A mixed design flow for FPGA prototyping of design with scan circuits

Scan circuits are utilized in our design to support some special functionalities besides test requirements, and thus they need to be inserted before the stage of function verification. In this paper, we propose a mixed design flow for field programmable gate array (FPGA) prototyping of the design with scan circuits. This mixed design flow combines the application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) design flow with typical FPGA design flow to implement automatically scan insertion. Experimental results show that this design flow functions well even for a complicated design, and only 2.5 % of the development time is required when compared to manual process.