Integrated circuit testing for quality assurance in manufacturing: history, current status, and future trends

Abstract

Integrated circuit (IC) testing for quality assurance is approaching 50% of the manufacturing costs for some complex mixed-signal IC's. For many years the market growth and technology advancements in digital IC's were driving the developments in testing. The increasing trend to integrate information acquisition and digital processing on the same chip has spawned increasing attention to the test needs of mixed-signal IC's. The recent advances in wireless communications indicate a trend toward the integration of the RF and baseband mixed signal technologies. In this paper we examine the developments in IC testing form the historic, current status and future view points. In separate sections we address the testing developments for digital, mixed signal and RF IC's. With these reviews as context, we relate new test paradigms that have the potential to fundamentally alter the methods used to test mixed-signal and RF parts.

A 0.8 μm CMOS testable switched-capacitor filter for video frequency applications

“…Modern mixedsignal ATEs are computer-controlled systems that generate appropriate analog stimuli, apply them to the circuit under test (CUT), digitize its outputs and perform analyses in the digital domain to extract the desired performance parameters. A comprehensive account on these and other achievements related to circuit automated testing can be found in [3].…”

“…The realization of transfer functions with M + N even requires all-pass filters with complex coefficients [2]. Having become one of the major factors in the overall fabrication costs, testing and diagnosis of analog and mixed signal integrated circuits (ICs) has increasingly attracted the interest of manufacturers and designers [3,4]. Advances in the MOS technology, as well as in circuit design techniques, have allowed the realization of sophisticated analog and digital functions in a single chip, where SC networks perform fundamental operations such as filtering, A/D and D/A conversion.…”

Built-in Loopback Test for IC RF Transceivers

“…Unlike this, much less success has been achieved in the analog/RF and mixed-signal ICs domain, where functional testing has been widely used and the major advances have been in the capabilities of expensive automatic test equipment (ATE). At present, the advancing complexity and performance of mixed-signal and RF ICs are pushing functional test methods and the ATE to the edge of their limits [1], [2]. In this context, alternative approaches based on analog fault modeling, design for testability (DfT) and BiST, so far not appreciated by industry, are appealing and can alleviate the problem [3].…”

CMOS blocks for on-chip RF test

“…This limits fault detectability due to masking behavior of the control path or the observation path. Providing more flexibility to reconfigure a chip could mitigate those shortcomings and further facilitate the test [2]. On the other hand, having an insight into RF IC design one can realize the existing tradeoffs between testability (DfT, BiST) and the required chip performance in the normal operation mode.…”