Hybrid Testing Schemes Based on Mutual and Signature Testing

Signature based techniques have been well known for the Built-in §elf-test of integrated systems. We propose a novel test architecture which uses a judicious combination of mutual testing and signature testing to achieve low test area overhead, low aliasing probability and low test application time. The proposed architecture is powerful for testing highly concurrent systems in applications such as iterative logic arrays, real-time systems, systolic arrays, and lowlatency pipelines which tend to have a large number of functional modules of a similar nature. We provide graph-theoretic optimization algorithms to optimize the test area and test application time of the resulting test architecture.