A distributed algorithm for XOR-Decompression with stimulus fragment move to reduce chip testing costs

Various techniques were used to reduce the test time and cost of chip development, some of which achieved their objective by reducing the test data volume through the implementation of compression technologies such as XOR-based decompressors. In the presence of XOR decompressor, the delivery of acceptable (encodable) test patterns can be challenging. To overcome this problem, the Align-Encode technique was introduced to manipulate the distribution of care bits in the test pattern in aim to increase the delivery of more encodable test patterns. The implementation of the Align-Encode algorithm proved that this algorithm suffers a major drawback when applied on large test patterns. In this paper, we propose a distributed algorithm for realizing the Align-Encode objectives but for large scale problems. This algorithm is designed to run on a scalable distributed environment. Moreover, it exploits the nature of the problem in order to make significant improvements in performance with respect to chip testing time as well as the number of encodable test patterns generated, which reflects positively on the cost of chip development and in test data compression as a result.