The Essentials of Testing Digital Circuits

Abstract

Testing is an important part of digital devices development life cycle and it takes about 70% of time to market. This paper discusses the various testing concepts as it relates to digital design and how it impacts the reliability of the final product. We also show that making designs testable by using appropriate design for testability techniques considerably reduces testing time and ensures a fine-grained diagnosis of finished product. A three bit counter circuit was used to illustrate the benefits of design for testability by using scan chain methodology.