Detection of Catastrophic Faults in 6-Bit R-2R Ladder DAC

This paper studies the problem of finding a high coverage minimum test set for a 6-bit R-2R ladder Digital-to-Analog Converter (DAC). DAC is a versatile component that is used in several applications such as audio and video systems, telecommunication, and digital processing. The focus of the paper is on DC testing for catastrophic faults. Regarding the fault model, a transistor is assumed to have five possible faults while a resistor has two faults. It is shown that only 3 test vectors out of the 64 input vectors are needed to detect 82 out of the 84 faults with a test coverage of 97.62%.