Title :
Effective design-for-testability techniques for H.264 all-binary integer motion estimation
Author :
Yeh, P.-Y. ; Ye, Bing-Yu ; Kuo, Sy-Yen ; Chen, Ing-Yi
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng., Nat. Taiwan Univ., Taipei, Taiwan
fDate :
9/1/2010 12:00:00 AM
Abstract :
H.264 is the latest video compression standard with the highest coding efficiency, and the All-Binary Integer Motion Estimation algorithm (H.264-ABIME) is usually adopted for reducing the hardware area. There are many repeated modules in the H.264-ABIME block, thus the well-known Iterative-Logic-Array (ILA) architecture can be applied to test all the modules with constant number of test patterns. The most important condition for the ILA architecture is that the I/O function of each module should be bijective (reversible). However, most of the original designs do not have this property. In this paper, effective design-for-testability schemes are proposed by using the ILA architecture for the entire H.264-ABIME block. The repeated modules are modified to be bijective and cascaded as the ILA architecture. Then each module can be fully tested by only testing the first module exhaustively. A simple built-in self-test circuit is also proposed. Moreover, the physical designs of the scan-chain and the proposed test schemes are synthesised with the UMC 0.18 m technology. The total test time of the proposed method is only about 13.53 of that of scan-chain method with automatic test pattern generation (ATPG), and the hardware and delay-time overheads are still very low.
Keywords :
automatic test pattern generation; built-in self test; data compression; design for testability; logic arrays; motion estimation; video coding; H.264 all-binary integer motion estimation; H.264-ABIME block; automatic test pattern generation; built-in self-test circuit; design-for-testability techniques; iterative-logic-array architecture; scan-chain method; size 0.18 mum; video coding; video compression; video resolution;
Journal_Title :
Circuits, Devices & Systems, IET
DOI :
10.1049/iet-cds.2009.0353