GSRC Student Profile:
Research Overview: Low-Cost Quality Assurance Techniques for High-Performance Mixed-Signal/RF Circuits and Systems
To ensure product quality, there are increasing variety of quality assurance techniques that range from post-silicon validation, manufacturing testing, silicon debugging, in-field testing, and life time resiliency. Adding dedicated circuitry for supporting each task would be very costly, as each technique incurs non-trivial overhead. This paper summarizes three low-cost quality assurance techniques that we recently developed. First, we propose to reuse existing on-chip resources such as the calibration circuits for other quality assurance tasks such as manufacturing testing. Then, we propose to tolerate manufacturing defects using application specific criteria for yield enhancement. We also develop all-digital built-in self-test techniques for mixed-signal and RF circuits that can be further used to tune he performance of the circuit. These techniques are demonstrated using case studies on digitally-assisted analog circuits and three-dimensional (3D) integration designs.
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