ABSTRACT
Various measurement techniques prove the diverse output parameters that characterize analog circuits and analog specifications. With the ever-increasing levels of integration of system-on-chip (SoC) designs, more and more of which include analog and mixed-signal (A/M-S) elements, test equipment, test development and test execution times, and costs are being increasingly impacted. As the designs have become larger with the advent of the SoC methodologies, design-for-test (DfT) is being used to provide test portability for reusable intellectual-property blocks or cores. The appropriate DfT and the possible built-in-self-test can be decided based on the test requirements and test resource availability. Hard and soft fault modeling and simulation, which address A/M-S circuits, have been the subject of many publications. Oscillation-based approaches seem to be the most applicable in practical implementations for all types of A/M-S devices. Testing A/M-S circuits often involves much more data and much more computation than is necessary for testing digital-only circuits.
