Tut4: Test and Design-for-Test of Mixed-Signal Integrated Circuits

Room: Diamant

Presenter:

Jose Luis Huertas and Marcelo Lubaszewski, Institut of Microelectronic, Seville, Spain

Abstract

This tutorial aims to introduce circuit designers into the problems of making integrated circuits more testable. An efficient test procedure for a complex, mixed-signal Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), must take several factors into consideration: stimuli generation, sufficient access, single test output, simple measurement set and system-level decomposition.

These factors worth attention for specific circuits classes, since there is no universal method valid for any kind of analog and/or mixed-signal function. Attention will be paid to integrated filters and integrated analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters, as they are today the main analog and mixed-signal cores found in state-of-the-art complex Systems-on-Chip (SoCs). In particular, the possibilities offered by techniques using small circuit modifications will be specially focused, as the means to improve circuit testability, and thus the fault coverage, while avoiding at most to degrade the performance of the final electronic system. Practical silicon examples will be presented, trying to give a flavour on the pros and cons that design for test is offering nowadays to integrated circuit designers.

To meet the goals stated above, the following topics are addressed in this tutorial: introduction to mixed-signal test (main test concepts, digital vs. analog testing, test practice in integrated circuit industry, design and test inter-relations), testing approaches (fault-based, specification-based, techniques for testing filters, techniques for testing converters), and design-for-test techniques (enhancing testability, built-in self-test and on-line test).

Presenters

Jose Luis Huertas received the Licenciado en Física degree and the Doctor en Ciencias Físicas degree in 1969 and 1973, respectively, both from the University of Sevilla, Spain. From 1970 to 1971, he was with the Philips International Institute, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, as a postgraduate student. Since 1971, he has been with the Departamento de Electrónica y Electromagnetismo , University of Sevilla, Spain, where he is a full professor. He is also the Director of the Instituto de Microelectrónica de Sevilla , Seville, Spain. His current interests include the design and testing of analog / digital integrated circuits, computer-aided IC analysis and design, fuzzy logic, nonlinear microelectronics, and neural networks. He has co-authored several books, published more than 300 papers in international journals and conferences. Since 1993, Dr. Huertas has been serving as the general chair of several conferences and workshops. Dr. Huertas was an Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. on CAS, and is at the Editorial Board of the Journal of Analog ICs and Signal Processing.

Marcelo Lubaszewski received the Electrical Engineering and M.Sc. degrees from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 1986 and 1990, respectively. In 1994, he received the Ph.D. degree from the Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble (INPG), France. He presently acts as a Researcher at the Instituto de Microelectr ónica de Sevilla (IMSE), in the frame of the Programa Ramón y Cajal of the Ministry of Science and Technology of Spain. He is currently on leave from UFRGS, where he has been an Associate Professor since 1990. His primary research interests include design and test of mixed-signal, microelectro-mechanical and core-based systems, self-checking and fault-tolerant architectures, and computer-aided testing. He has published over 100 papers on these topics. Dr. Lubaszewski has served as the general chair or program chair of several conferences. He has also served as a Guest Editor of the Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications and as an Associate Editor of the Design and Test of Computers Magazine.