A scheme of test data compression based on coding of even bits marking and selective output inversion

A new scheme of test data compression/decompression, namely coding of even bits marking and selective output inversion, is presented. It first uses a special kind of codewords, odd bits of which are used to represent the length of runs and even bits of which are used to represent whether the codewords finish. The characteristic of the codewords make the structure of decompressor simple. It then introduces a structure of selective output inversion to increase the probability of 0s. This scheme can obtain a better compression ratio than some already known schemes, but it only needs a very low hardware overhead. The performance of the scheme is experimentally confirmed on the larger examples of the ISCAS89 benchmark circuits.