Improved Fault Diagnosis of Analog Circuits using Light Emission Measures

Good testability and robust fault diagnosis solutions are extremely important factors for an electronic circuit. However, these goals are difficult to achieve in analog circuits. It is even a more complex problem when such circuits are used in safety domains like automotive. In this work, an active exploitation of the light emission from silicon devices is proposed. This constitutes a new fault diagnosis method. In particular, how to characterize the light emission from the basic principles and mechanisms is presented. Then the description of how it is used as a parameter in automatic fault simulators is given. The results of this paper prove the benefits of such methods in fault diagnosis and testability of the analog circuits.