Enhancing test effectiveness for analog circuits using synthesized measurements

The use of alternate tests in addition to specification-based measurements is achieving more recognition in industry due to the higher coverage that they provide. The fault and yield coverages of these tests depend on how the pass/fail test decision is made. In this paper we address the critical issue of accurate test threshold determination for these alternate tests. We propose to post-process the given set of sensitive and linearly independent measurements to synthesize a new set of measurements based on which the pass/fail decision is made. A novel methodology for post processing the measurement results called measurement synthesis is presented. Simulation results show that test effectiveness can be greatly enhanced by measurement synthesis.