Counter reduction techniques for Hamming count

Hardware overhead reduction through counter selection is considered for the Hamming count compaction test. A method to choose the most effective syndrome and input variable counter combination is introduced. Both simulation and theoretical analysis illustrate that the proposed method produces an optimal pairing. Adaptations in the counter selection method are made forming a greedy strategy for choosing multiple counters to combine with the syndrome counter. Complexity of both the single and multiple counter selection algorithms is very reasonable. The method promotes intelligent counter selection to minimize any impact test hardware reduction will have on fault detection