A UNIFIED APPROACH FOR FAULT SIMULATION OF LINEAR MIXED-SIGNAL CIRCUITS

The rapidly evolving role of analog signal processing has spawned off a variety of mixed-signal circuit applications. The integration of the analog and digital circuits has created a lot of concerns in testing these devices. This paper presents an efficient unified fault simulati on platform for mixed-signal circuits while accounting for the impreci sion in analog signals. While the classical stuck-at fault model is us ed for the digital part, faults in the analog circuit cover catastroph ic as well as parametric defects in the passive and active components. A unified framework is achieved by combining a discretized representa tion of the analog circuit with the Z-domain representation of the dig ital part. Due to the imprecise nature of analog signals, an arithmeti c distance based fault detection criterion and a statistical measure o f digital fault coverage are proposed.