Self-Freeze Linear Decompressors for Low Power Testing

Even though linear decompressors constitute a very effective solution for compressing test data, they cause increased shift power dissipation during scan testing. Recently, a new linear decompression architecture was proposed which offers reduced shift power at the expense however of increased test data volume and test sequence length. In this paper we present a new linear encoding method which offers both high compression and low shift power dissipation at the same time. A new low-cost, test-set-independent scheme is also proposed which can be combined with any linear decompressor for reducing the shift power during testing. Extensive experiments show that the proposed method offers reduced test power dissipation, test sequence length and test data volume at the same time, with very small area requirements.