A Hold Friendly Flip-Flop For Area Recovery

In this paper a new family of scan flip-flops is introduced whose scan pin hold characteristic has improved while data pin timing is left intact. This characteristic helps to alleviate scan chain hold problem while meeting the maximum frequency in data path. This solution can reduce the number of buffers inserted in the scan chain to fix hold violations. The new flip-flop can save up to 29% area as compared to the usage of normal flip-flop combined with hold-fixing buffers.