A Novel Methodology for Functional Test Data Compression

This paper presents a novel approach for compressing functional test data in automatic test equipment (ATE). A practical technique is presented for 2 dimensional (2D) reordering of test data in which additionally to test vector reordering, column reordering is also applied. An ATE based approach to extract the original test vectors from the 2D ordered data is presented. The advantage of the approach is substantiated using the figure of merit of entropy for the 2D ordered test data of ISCAS benchmark circuits