A scheduling method in high-level synthesis for acyclic partial scan design

Abstract

Acyclic partial scan design is an efficient DFT method. This paper presents a scheduling method for reducing the number of scan registers for an acyclic structure. In order to estimate the number of scan registers during scheduling, we propose provisional binding of operational units, and show a force-directed scheduling algorithm with the provisional binding. Experimental results show that the number of scan registers in the resulting RTL datapaths can be reduced by our method combined with the binding algorithm for acyclic partial scan.