A Low Cost Partial Scan Approach Based on Balanced Sequential Graph Transformation

This paper proposes a new partial scan approach in which the problem of selecting flip-flops in partial scan designs is converted to the balanced graph transformation problem based on an integer linear programming formulation. The complexity of the problem is analyzed and a scalable approach is proposed to deal with complicated circuits. Experimental results on a set of benchmark circuits show that on average the proposed approach reduces the area overhead by 25% compared with the full scan approach and by 17.8% compared with the existing balanced structure-based partial scan approach.