Synthesis of optimal 1-hot coded on-chip controllers for BIST hardware

The authors present a procedure for merging on-chip controllers for BIST (built-in self-test) circuitry to reduce hardware overhead. Instead of starting with one minimal state assignment and then performing state, input, and output encoding, one picks the 1-hot code state assignment and implicitly searches the space of minimum prime compatible state covers to obtain an optimal merged controller. This procedure uses knowledge of the greatest lower bounds on states, arcs, next-state, and the output logic of the merged controller to prune the search space.<>