Design of BIST using Self-Checking Circuits for Multipliers

Background: Current technologies results in gradual increase in sensitiveness towards faults causing malfunctioning of the circuit. This paper presents the novel design of Built-In-Self-Test (BIST) using self-checking circuits for bit array multipliers. Methods: The design of BIST comprises of self-checking full adder which ensures fault detection on the same chip area. Each regular full adders and half adders in bit array multipliers are replaced by self-checking full adder so that any transient or permanent faults can be detected and recovered. The proposed BIST design also allows power saving procedures in Power Efficient-Test Pattern Generator (PE-TPG). Findings: Simulation results shows that implementation of this self-checking full adder into standard bit array multiplier minimizes the area overhead and power consumption by 25%-30% as compared to previous self-checking designs. The proposed BIST can handle up to ten faults with 70% probability of error detection, which is higher than earlier Double Modular Redundancy (DMR) as well as Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR) technique with handling of six faults with 60% error detection probability. Conclusion: The proposed BIST design forms the base of area and power efficient testing methodologies for digital circuits. The architecture of BIST can be modified according to the data path of multiplier under test.