A Robust Pulsed Flip-flop and its use in Enhanced Scan Design Conference Paper uri icon

abstract

  • Delay faults are frequently encountered in nanometer technologies. Therefore, it is critical to detect these faults during factory test. Testing for a delay fault requires the application of a pair of test vectors in an at-speed manner. To maximize the delay fault detection capability, it is desired that the vectors in this pair are independent. Independent vector pairs cannot always be applied to a circuit implemented with standard scan design approaches. However, this can be achieved by using enhanced scan flip-flops, which store two bits of data. This paper has two contributions. First, we develop a pulsed flip-flop (PFF) design. Second, we present an enhanced scan flipflop design, based on our PFF circuit. We have compared the performance of our pulse based flip-flop with recently published pulse based flip-flop designs, as well as a traditional masterslave D flip-flop. Our PFF shows significant improvements in power and timing compared to the other designs. Our pulse based enhanced scan flip-flop (PESFF) has 13% lower power dissipation and 26% better timing than a conventional D flipflop based enhanced scan flip-flop (DESFF). The layout area of our PESFF is 5.2% smaller than the DESFF. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate that our design is more robust to process variations than the DESFF. 2009 IEEE.

name of conference

  • 2009 IEEE International Conference on Computer Design

published proceedings

  • 2009 IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTER DESIGN

author list (cited authors)

  • Kumar, R., Bollapalli, K. C., Garg, R., Soni, T., & Khatri, S. P.

citation count

  • 11

complete list of authors

  • Kumar, Rajesh||Bollapalli, Kalyana C||Garg, Rajesh||Soni, Tarun||Khatri, Sunil P

publication date

  • October 2009