TEST AND DESIGN-FOR-TEST OF MIXED-SIGNAL INTEGRATED CIRCUITS

摘要

Although most electronic circuits are almost entirely digital, many include at least a small part that is essentially analog. This is due to the need to interface with the real physical world, that is analog in nature. As demanding market segments require ever more complex mixed-signal solutions, high quality tests become essential to meet circuit design specifications in terms of reliability, time-to-market, costs, etc. In order to lower costs associated to traditional specification-driven tests and, additionally, achieve acceptable fault coverages for analog and mixed-signal circuits, it is reasonable to expect that no other solution than a move towards defect-oriented design-for-test methods will be applicable in the near future. Therefore, testing tends to be dominated by embedded mechanisms to allow for accessibility to internal test points, to achieve on-chip test generation, on-chip test response evaluation, or even to make it possible the detection of errors concurrently to the circuit application. Within this context, an overview of existing test methods is given in this chapter, focusing on design-for-testability, built-in self-test and self-checking techniques suitable for the detection of realistic defects in analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits.