The Effects of Space Compactors on Fault Diagnosis Resolution

[aruljothi]

Abstract

In scan-based test environment, designs with
embedded compression techniques can achieve dramatic
reduction in test data volume, test application time and
test cost. With the embedded test data compression
techniques becoming popular, fault diagnosis with
compacted test data becomes an important research area.
A common belief is that diagnosis resolution will drop
due to aliasing introduced by test response compactors. In
this paper, we show that the impact of space compactors
on diagnosis resolution is generally so small that it can be
ignored. Therefore direct diagnosis [CHE04] can be
applied to circuits with embedded test response
compactors to achieve diagnosis resolution that is
comparable to that for circuits that do not use compactors.