About a dozen years ago, the world of test had reached an economic impasse: most digital designs had become sufficiently complex that standard scan testing techniques were no longer cost-effective.

For the past five years, the cost of test has prevailed as the hottest topic in test. During this period, automated test equipment (ATE) has made a dramatic move towards low-cost design for test (DFT) ...

Test compression technology was invented to address the problem of escalating test-pattern size. Compression allows more test vectors to be applied to an IC in a shorter time and with fewer tester ...