From specification to measurement: the bottleneck in analog industrial testing

The translation of the specification of an analog device into the necessary set of measurements to be carried out by an industrial test facility is discussed. Algorithms are developed to compute the number of test vectors needed to guarantee a certain parameter and to compare several possible test methods based on accuracy. It is shown that the specification of a circuit can be transformed into single-parameter measurements, to be carried out by an industrial test facility. There is a tradeoff between the number of measurements and the accuracy of the specified parameter. A computationally efficient tradeoff between test methods based on maximum accuracy can be made. One of the aspects needed to make these tradeoffs, the measurement error, can be predicted using one of the proposed experiments. There is a tradeoff between the complexity of the experiment and the accuracy of the error prediction