Abstract: Aspects of the present disclosure provide a method generally including obtaining one or more built-in self-test (BIST) patterns, each pattern including a series of instructions, applying a compression scheme to generate one or more compressed BIST patterns, wherein the compression scheme encodes an operation and data field of instructions to generate encoded instructions, each encoded instruction having an identifier (ID) field and a variable number of data bytes, wherein the ID field identifies a type of the operation and indicates the variable number of data bytes, and storing the compressed BIST patterns.