Automated Scan Chain Division for Reducing Shift and Capture Power During Broadside At-Speed Test

Scan chain division has been successfully used to control shift power by enabling mutually exclusive flip-flops at different times during the scan cycle. However, to control capture power without losing transition fault coverage during at-speed scan test, the existing automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) flows need to be modified. In this paper, we present a novel scan chain division algorithm that analyzes the signal dependencies and creates the circuit partitions such that both shift and capture power can be reduced when using the existing ATPG flows. This novel algorithm has been designed for the broadside test application strategy, and a technique for employing partial scan when dividing the scan chains is also proposed.