Response shaper: A novel technique to enhance unknown tolerance for output response compaction

The presence of unknown values in the simulation result is a key barrier to effective output response compaction in practice. This paper proposes a simple circuit module, called a response shaper, to reshape the scan-out responses before feeding them to a space compactor. Along with the proposed reshaping algorithm, response shapers can help the space compactor to reduce the number of un-detectable modeled and un-modeled faults in the presence of un-known values. Moreover, the proposed compaction scheme is ATPG-independent and its hardware requirement is pattern-independent. In our experiments, we use a simple XOR compactor as the space compactor to evaluate the effectiveness of the response shaper. The results show that the number of undetectable faults and unobservable scan-out responses can be significantly reduced in comparison with the results of a convolutional compactor. The number of the extra scan-in bits required for the control signals of the response shapers is only a small fraction of the total test data volume. Also, its hardware overhead is acceptable and the runtime of the reshaping algorithm is scalable for large industrial designs.