Guest Editorial: Analog, Mixed-Signal and RF Testing

Excerpt

The role of nano-electronic systems is rapidly expanding in every facet of modern life. To interact with environment and users, integrated circuits need analog, mixed-signal, RF or MEMS blocks. These blocks could represent a small part of the chip area but have a major impact on IC yield and reliability. Indeed, one of the major bottlenecks nowadays for nano-electronics systems is the post-manufacturing testing of their analog, mixed-signal, RF, and MEMS functions, in order to guarantee outgoing quality while not sacrificing yield. Testing such functions is becoming a dominant contributor to the overall manufacturing cost of an integrated system. Moreover, in addition to the post-manufacturing testing problem, modern safety-critical, mission-critical, and remote-controlled systems need to be equipped with self-test, concurrent error detection, and fault-tolerance capabilities so as to detect early reliability hazards and guarantee reliable operation even in harsh environments. For such systems, diagnosing the sources of failures occurring in the field of operation is of vital importance, in order to apply corrective actions and to prevent failure reoccurrence. In this scenario, there is still a lot of room for innovation to improve AMS-RF testing. …