Effective Built-In Self-Test for Booth Multipliers

0740-7475/98/$10.00 © 1998 IEEE 105 MODULE GENERATORS PROVIDED by library vendors supply chip designers with optimized Booth multipliers, which are widely used as embedded cores in both generalpurpose data path structures and specialized digital signal processors. Designers frequently use Booth multipliers in areaand speedcritical parts of complex ICs. Compared to standard array multipliers, Booth multipliers are faster and require less area, and their regular structure (see box on page 106) facilitates efficient implementation and testing in VLSI devices. Therefore, the Booth architecture is the basis of most embedded multipliers produced by automatic synthesis tools.1 Testing these deeply embedded multipliers requires an effective BIST scheme that can be easily synthesized along with the multiplier by the module generator. We have developed a BIST scheme for Booth multipliers that fulfills this requirement.