Reducing Silicon Real Estate and Switching Activity using Low Power Test Pattern Generator Implemented on FPGA

Power dissipation is a challenging problem for today’s system-on-chip design and test. This paper presents a novel architecture which generates the test patterns with reduced switching activities; it has the advantage of low test power and low hardware overhead. The proposed LP-TPG (test pattern generator) structure consists of modified low power linear feedback shift register (LP-LFSR), m-bit counter, gray counter, NOR-gate structure and XOR-array. The seed generated from LP-LFSR is EXCLUSIVE-OR ed with the data generated from gray code generator. The XOR result of the sequence is single input changing (SIC) sequence, in turn reduces the switching activity and so power dissipation will be very less. The proposed architecture is simulated using Modelsim and synthesized using Xilinx ISE9.2.The Xilinx chip scope tool will be used to test the logic running on FPGA.