A new low overhead design for testability of programmable logic arrays

A new design to reduce the overhead required for fully testable programmable logic arrays (PLAs) is proposed. This design exploits the fact that product lines in a PLA can be rearranged and grouped into few partitions. Then, some extra outputs are added, one per partition, to make the whole PLA testable. Compared with the previous PLA design-for-testability techniques, the algorithm presented is very feasible, and its implementation is straightforward. Furthermore, this algorithm significantly lowers overhead and provides substantially higher fault coverage than some existing schemes.