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A promising solution to reduce the testing costs of analog/RF circuits is the alternate test strategy, which permits to replace costly specification measurements by simple low-cost indirect measurements. This approach has been widely explored and demonstrated in the literature on various case studies over the past twenty years. However it is clear that the efficiency of this strategy strongly depends...
Usually Anisotropic Magnetoresistance angle sensors are configured with two Wheatstone bridges, but an undesirable offset voltage included in the sensor output affects its accuracy. The total offset voltage combines a voltage due to resistance mismatches during manufacturing and a voltage from inequalities in the magnetic sensitivity. This paper focuses on identifying a consistent trend between the...
A methodology to estimate the lifetime due to gate oxide breakdown (GOBD) is presented. The results of this analysis show that devices in analog circuits experience unequal stress acceleration and this impacts lifetime estimates at use conditions and can cause some devices to fail relatively more frequently under accelerated conditions in comparison with use conditions. We calculate the impact of...
A new methodology for fault detection on wearable medical devices is proposed. The main strategy relies on correctly classifying the captured physiological signals, in order to distinguish whether the actual cause is a wearer health abnormality or a system functional flaw. Data fusion techniques, namely fuzzy logic, are employed to process the captured data, like the electrocardiogram and blood pressure,...
The on-chip generation of high quality at-speed sinusoidal stimuli is a key point for enabling a wide variety of mixed-signal BIST (Built-In Self-Test) strategies. Efficient test stimulus generators for BIST applications should have the attributes of high spectral quality and reduced circuitry resources, which make the design of these generators a challenging task. This work compares the application...
This work presents guidelines for the design of an on-chip ramp signal generator for static Built-In Self-Test (BIST) of ADCs. The proposed ramp generator is based on a fully-differential switched-capacitor (SC) integrator conveniently modified to produce a very small integration gain. The main non-idealities affecting the linearity of the generator are discussed on a practical implementation in a...
To warrant the functionality of safety critical circuits and systems, underlying functions have to be modeled in a fashion that preserves real-world structure. That means, it must be ensured that the formally derived functions of the real-world structure should be in consistent conformance with the functions generated by the structure itself. Conversely, from safety-related aspects, it is fatal, when...
In modern automotive designs double contacts are mandatory to achieve high reliability products and avoid field returns due to contact issues during the lifetime of the product. Using double contacts in compact digital IPs like RAM, ROM or NVMs leads to a dramatic area penalty. High area efficient NMVs are using shared contacts to minimize the area needed to realize the NVM bit cells. Using double...
The accuracy in making Magnetic Sensitivity measurements of an integrated three-dimension Hall sensor can in general be very challenging. Sensitivity measurements are typically performed using an integrated coil system, which allows the generation of a low strength magnetic field. When the required field strength is greater than a few hundreds microTesla an external magnetic field source is needed...
Carbon Nanotube network based Thin-Film Transistors (CN-TFTs) are excellent candidates for next generation flexible electronics applications. However CN-TFT circuits suffer from imperfections due to morphological variations of fabricated carbon nanotube geometries that cause wide performance variations in analog amplifiers built from these CN-TFTs. Improved fabrication methods and sophisticated process...
With a BER to SNR correlation, it was found that it was possible to test ACR in VHF receivers with one measurement. Moving component testing for any device from the bench to ATE poses many challenges, but releasing a high-speed RF device with a design margin issue to a production setting is somewhat challenging. To facilitate the testing of ACR in a production environment, a technique was found that...
While working with designers and DFT engineers in companies evaluating an “industrial-strength” analog fault simulator, it became apparent that intuition and theory often differ regarding random sampling of defects to simulate. This paper explores these differences. In one case, it was hoped that simulating more defects would increase the estimated coverage. In a second case, it was assumed that pre-simulation...
Demand for analogue precision and accuracy has significantly increased over the last few years, way beyond what the foundries can produce. At the same time short design cycles require the addition of digital configuration, trim, or assist functions to compensate for variation and uncertainties. Favourable configurations and trim values are then stored on chip in fuse arrays or OTP (One Time Programmable)...
Functional verification and Virtual Test, which is verification of a test procedure, of mixed-signal circuits share the need for efficient simulation capabilities. Switching DC/DC converters are a particularly hard problem, because traditional SPICE-type simulation approaches incur simulation efforts which prevent one from covering all conceivable use-cases. The new IEEE 1800-2012 standard for SystemVerilog...
This paper describes the evaluation of an oscillation-based approach specially thought for testing a low-power analog system that monitors an implantable biomedical device (intelligent stent). Fault simulation analysis has been performed on the basic blocks of the CUT, and oscillation parameters (frequency and amplitude) have been measured at the output of the last system block, an oscillator. Taking...
In this paper, a systematic design methodology is proposed to design a triangular wave generator circuit. Using this methodology, various oscillation frequencies can be obtained in a shorter design time. Furthermore, the variations in the oscillation frequency are controlled across all process corners. The proposed methodology employs a transistor sizing and biasing CAD tool called CHAMS, in which...
In today's systems, analog and mixed-signal (AMS) circuits are tightly interwoven with HW/SW systems and the application. Hence, a verification of the AMS part alone is not sufficient any more, in particular considering its application in Cyber-Physical Systems. In order to guarantee ‘first time right’, the accuracy of the models, the validation of the application fitness, and in changing, uncertain...
Smart Power IC integrating high voltage devices with low voltage control blocks becomes more and more popular in automotive industry recently. Minority carriers injected into the substrate during switching of high power stages cause malfunction of sensitive nearby low voltage devices. Sometimes this may be destructive due to the presence of triggered latch up. The minority carriers propagation is...
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