Testing analogue and mixed-signal integrated circuits by weighted sum of selected node voltages

Abstract

System-on-chip (SOC) design based on intellectual property (IP) cores has become a growing trend in integrated circuit (IC) design. Testing of such cores is a challenging problem, especially when these cores are deeply embedded in the system chip. The wrapper of the P1500 standard can facilitate the testing of such cores; however, a full-size wrapper is expensive because the hardware overhead is large. If the requirement for testing I/O pins of IP cores is considered and reduced to a minimum during the core design, SOC designers will need to put much less effort into testing the cores. In this paper, a built-in self-test (BIST) technique, which is applicable to both analogue and mixed-signal integrated circuits and is based on the weighted sum of selected node voltages, is proposed. Besides high fault coverage, the proposed BIST technique needs only one extra testing output pin, and only a single dc stimulus is needed to feed at the primary input of the circuit under test (CUT). Hence, the proposed BIST technique is especially suitable for testing IP cores.