Proceedings of The Eighth IEEE International On-Line Testing Workshop (IOLTW'02)
Built-in Generation of m -Sequences with Irreducible Characteristic Polynomials
Isle of Bendor, France
July 08-July 10
ISBN: 0-7695-1641-6
In this paper, we show that m-sequences for built-in Test Pattern Generation (TPG) can be efficiently generated by LFSR structures that have non-primitive irreducible characteristic polynomials. We present two mechanisms that can generate the required number of seeds with very low hardware overhead that is independent of the number of seeds. This enhances the choices available for the design of appropriate TPG structures for pseudo-exhaustive or pseudo-random TPG that were previously limited to primitive characteristic polynomials only.