Vector based Analog to Digital Converter sequential testing methodology to minimize ATE memory and analysis requirements

Mixed signal circuits typically require more complex specification based testing as compared to digital circuits, which can be completely tested with structural or simple functional tests. Due to the analog nature of some of the internal nodes and external signals in mixed signal circuits, qualitative functional tests may be required to assure circuit performance at all operating points. Mixed signal blocks such as Analog to Digital Converters (ADC) and Digital to Analog Converters (DAC) act as interfaces between the digital processing modules of the System on a Chip (SoC) and interfacing analog domains. These converters are increasingly common on SoCs due to ever-increasing presence of real world analog signals that use the processing capabilities of the digital blocks. High volume production testing of these mixed-signal components is inefficient due to test complications, resulting in the use of high-performance Automatic Test Equipment (ATE). While various Built-in Self Test (BiST) schemes are proposed to provide the analog test stimulus, the conventional histogram analysis method is still in use for the majority of ADC testing applications. We review a proposal for ADC output test involving a functional pattern, effectively resulting in a real-time-code-analysis. Memory and processing constraints for the ATE are reduced as this vector based method is not ATE memory intensive while providing an output quality measure identical to the conventional histogram method.