Power Management during Scan Based Sequential Circuit Testing

Abstract: This paper shows that not every scan cell contributes equally to the power consumption during scan based test. The transitions at some scan cells cause more toggles at the internal signal lines of a circuit than the transitions at other scan cells. Hence the transitions at these scan cells have a larger impact on the power consumption during test application. These scan cells are called power sensitive scan cells.A verilog based approach is proposed to identify a set of power sensitive scan cells. Additional hardware is added to freeze the outputs of power sensitive scan cells during scan shifting in order to reduce the shift power consumption.when multiple scan chain is incorporated along with freezing the power sensitive scan cell,over all power during testing can be reduced to a larger extend.