Design of Low Power TPG Using LP-LFSR

This paper presents a novel test pattern generator which is more suitable for built in self test (BIST) structures used for testing of VLSI circuits. The objective of the BIST is to reduce power dissipation without affecting the fault coverage. The proposed test pattern generator reduces the switching activity among the test patterns at the most. In this approach, the single input change patterns generated by a counter and a gray code generator are Exclusive -- ORed with the seed generated by the low power linear feedback shift register [LP-LFSR]. The proposed scheme is evaluated by using, a synchronous pipelined 4x4 and 8x8 Braun array multipliers. The System-On-Chip (SOC) approach is adopted for implementation on Altera Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) based SOC kits with Nios II soft-core processor. From the implementation results, it is verified that the testing power for the proposed method is reduced by a significant percentage.