Digital Testing of ICs for Automotive Applications

The gradual change in consumer mindset from considering horsepower, style, and reliability as key factors when buying automobiles, to better energy efficiency, lower emissions, and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is resulting in an exponential growth in the amount of electronics that is being added into cars today. Whether it is the desire to safely access contents in the car for infotainment, or the need for advanced driver assistance for a safer drive, or vehicle-to-vehicle communication for getting alerts from highway sensors or transportation authorities, electronics is the key for making these features a reality. As the number of electronic components in cars is on the rise, the standards driving safety and reliability (such as ISO 26262) in the automotive space are applicable to the ICs that are being used in cars as well. It is not only important to guarantee very high quality for the semiconductor devices being used, it is equally important to constantly test and monitor the health of such devices during its normal operation. Consequently, ICs manufactured for automotive applications pose some unique challenges in the area of VLSI testing -a)How to improve test quality to reduce the overall DPPM targets to single digits? b)How to test a device in-system when it is idle but the system is in operation?In this tutorial, we will present recent advances in digital testing that enables manufacturing of high quality ICs being used for various automotive applications. Multi-core designs, heterogeneous component integration, and sophisticated packaging techniques aggravate the challenge of testing such devices effectively. We will discuss some of the advanced fault models such as n-detect, timing aware, and cell-aware that are gaining traction and being deployed for manufacturing test of such designs in the automotive space. Numerous case studies and results based on silicon experiments will be presented.