Testen en ontwerpen voor de testbaarheid van latente defecten in gemengd-signaal geïntegreerde schakelingen

With the increasing immersion of electronics in our society, dependability and robustness become crucial. Since the VLSI production process cannot avoid defects, high coverage rates are needed in the detection of these during the testing stage. For mixed-signal applications, in particular, the analog and mixed-signal circuits still have higher escape rates. If needed to improve the coverage, design for testability techniques can be used. These change the circuit in order to increase controllability and/or observability. While recent developments have improved the fault coverage in mixed-signal integrated circuits, latent defects remain a problem. These are defects that are present in the dies but are not expressed right after fabrication; they only become active after some time of stressing the IC, creating the problem during usage in the field. The Ph.D. involves research towards increasing the detection of such latent defects in analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits. In particular, novel activation and detection techniques will be developed. Challenges are the limited voltage range available and mastering the overhead cost of these techniques