Impact of partial reset on fault independent testing and BIST

Partial reset has been shown to have significant impact on deterministic test generation for sequential circuits. In this paper we explore the use of partial reset in fault-independent testing and application to built-in self-test. We take the following approach: based on fault propagation analysis, we select a subset of the circuit flip-flops to be initialized to 0 or 1. The initialization (set/reset) is performed periodically while the test input vectors to the sequential circuit are applied. An average improvement of 15% in fault-coverage has been obtained for circuits resistant to random pattern testing.