PSEUDORANDOM TESTING FOR MIXED-SIGNAL CIRCUITS

In this paper, we propose a pseudorandom testing scheme for mixed-sign al circuits. We first describe the pseudorandom testing technique for linear analog components and converters in mixed-signal circuits, With proper arithmetic operations on the responses to the random patterns, the impulse response of the device under test (DUT) can be constructe d and used as the signature, By checking the constructed signatures ag ainst the derived tolerance ranges, we can infer the correctness of th e DUT without explicitly measuring the original performance parameters , We also describe a technique of mapping the tolerance ranges in the performance space to its associated tolerance ranges in the signature space, The major advantages of our pseudorandom testing scheme are: 1) a universal input stimulus (white noise) is used and thus test genera tion can he avoided, 2) signatures for high quality testing can be eas ily constructed and thus testing cost can be minimized, and 3) the sch eme can be used for Built-In Self-Test (BIST) implementation for DSP-b ased mixed-signal designs, We present simulation results to illustrate the effectiveness of the scheme.