The Illinois Scan Architecture (ILS) consists of several scan path segments and is useful in reducing test application time and test data volume for high density chips. In this paper, we propose a scheme of layout-aware as well as coverage-driven ILS design. The partitioning of the flip-flops into ILS segments is determined by their geometric locations, whereas the set of the flip-flops to be placed in parallel is determined by the minimum incompatibility relations among the corresponding bits of a test set, to enhance fault coverage in broadcast mode. As a result, the number of serial test patterns also reduces.

Tree-based scan path architectures have recently been suggested for reducing test application time or test data volume in today's high-density very large scale integrated circuits. However, these techniques strongly rely on the existence of a large number of compatible sets of flip-flops under the given test set and therefore may not be suitable for a highly compact test set generated by an efficient automatic test pattern generator tool. Tree-based architectures also suffer from loss of fault coverage while achieving a significant reduction ratio for test time or data. In this paper, to circumvent this problem, a new two-pass hybrid method is proposed to design an efficient scan tree architecture based on approximate compatibility. The method is particularly suitable for a highly compact test set having fewer don't cares and low compatibility. Finally, to reduce the volume of scan-out data, test responses shifted out from the leaf nodes of the scan tree are compacted by a space compactor, which is designed specially for the proposed scan tree architecture. The compactor uses an XOR tree, and its overhead is low. The design thus offers a solution to both test data and response compaction. Experimental results on various benchmark circuits demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the earlier methods in reducing test application time significantly without degrading fault coverage.

This paper introduces an efficient implementation of a test access mechanism (TAM) for mixed-signal system-on-chip (MSOC) testing. The design-for-testability (DFT) strategy has been developed to make the testing of analog cores digitally compliant. The mixed-signal cores have been accessed through specially design mechanisms (switches). A computer-aided test (CAT) tool employing the proposed algorithm has been developed. Extensive experiments have been performed on MSOC benchmarks built of ISCAS'89 circuits for digital cores and ITC'97 circuits for analog cores. Results show that the CAT tool provides a hardware-efficient integrated solution.

Scan based testing is a powerful and popular test technique. However the scan chain can be used by an attacker to decipher the cryptogram. The present paper shows such a side-channel attack on LFSR-based stream ciphers using scan chains. The paper subsequently discusses a strategy to build the scan chains in a tree based pattern with a selfchecking compactor. It has been shown that such a structure prevents such scan based attacks but does not compromise on fault coverage.