Mixed-signal BIST computation offloading using IEEE 1687

Current mixed-signal BIST approaches are aimed to move test instrumentation on-chip to reduce the cost of test. However, this can result in a high overhead even for non-time critical DSP tasks that could be executed remotely if a suitable access was available. The new IEEE 1687-2014 standard provides such a portable and efficient infrastructure and can allow decoupling of digital and analog development extremely early in the design flow. In this paper, we demonstrate the approach by applying it to a ΣΔ modulator BIST. In this case study, we exploit 1687 to offload the computationally-heavy spectral analysis that may be responsible of nearly 80% of the total BIST overhead.