Low-cost quality assurance techniques for high-performance mixed-signal/RF circuits and systems

There exist a variety of quality assurance techniques for tasks ranging from post-silicon validation, silicon debugging, manufacturing testing, in-field testing, and life time resiliency. Adding dedicated circuitry to exclusively support each task would be too costly, as each technique incurs non-trivial overheads. This paper describes three cost-effective quality assurance techniques that attempt to increase the reuse and sharing of test circuitry for multiple quality assurance tasks. First, we propose to reuse the calibration circuitry in mixed-signal/RF systems for manufacturing testing. Then, we propose the concept of application-aware testing for which application-specific criteria are used for defect screening of components. Some of the manufacturing defects which do not cause any system failures for the target applications will not be rejected and thus resulting in yield enhancement. We also develop an all-digital built-in self-test technique for mixed-signal and RF circuits that can be further used to tune the circuit performance. These techniques are demonstrated using digitally-assisted analog circuits and three-dimensional (3D) integrated designs.