Low-Cost Defect Simulation Framework for Analog and Mixed Signal (AMS) Circuits with Enhanced Time-Efficiency

Abstract

Defect-oriented testing is becoming increasingly popular in recent times, especially in safety-critical applications in automotive, space and medical industries. The stringent quality requirements from these industries such as zero defective parts per million (DPPM) necessities a need to have efficient defect testing methods. Furthermore, the overall development time of integrated circuit can be reduced by reducing the defect simulation time. In this work, we present a simple and time-efficient defect simulation framework for pre-silicon testing of AMS circuits. In our method, a given defect model is realized using Verilog-A modules and tests multiple defects in a circuit in a single-run simulation. In contrast to the conventional defect simulation framework, our method saves simulation time by avoiding the repetitive work of generating a netlist for each defect and by reducing the time overhead for the simulator to interface with data/file-handling system. To strongly validate our proposed framework, we use diverse AMS circuits such as operational amplifier (op amp), fast transient flipped-voltage follower based low-dropout regulator (FVF LDO) and Successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converters (ADC). For DC testing schemes used for op amp and LDO testing, we show that our proposed framework reduces the simulation time to less than one-tenth (1/10th) in comparison with conventional framework. On the other hand, for the transient testing scheme, the proposed framework reduces the simulation time to less than 50% of the conventional framework. Furthermore, we also show that there is no negative impact on the defect coverage using the proposed framework.