Introducing redundant transformations for built-in self-testable data path allocation

In our previous work, we described a high-level data path allocation algorithm to facilitate built-in self-test designs. In this paper, we make use of two types of redundant transformations, which add redundancy that improves test resources to be shared in the data path, to improve our previous data path allocation algorithm. The algorithm generates self-testable data path design while maximizing the sharing of modules and test registers. The sharing of modules and test registers enables only a small number of registers to be modified for BIST, thereby decreasing the hardware area which is one of the major overheads for the BIST technique. With a variety of benchmarks, we demonstrate the advantage of our approach compared with our previous and other conventional approaches.