Evaluation of indirect measurement selection strategies in the context of analog/RF alternate testing

Abstract

This paper is in the field of Analog or RF integrated circuit testing. The conventional practice for testing those circuits relies on the measurement of the device-under-test (DUT) specifications. In order to reduce test costs, a promising approach, called indirect or alternate testing has been proposed. Its basic principle consists in using the correlation between the conventional analog/RF performances and some low-cost measurements, called Indirect Measurements (IMs), in order to estimate the analog/RF parameters without measuring directly them. The objective of this paper is to perform a comparative analysis of different IM selection strategies in order to define efficient alternate testing implementation. Efficiency is discussed in terms of model accuracy and predictions robustness. Results are illustrated on a Power Amplifier (PA) test vehicle for which we have experimental test data on 10,000 circuits.