Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
In honor of Labor Day, I thought I would jump over to the Built-In Self-Test (BIST) wing of the DFT Castle.
I will provide you with a quick tour. Then when you hear the term in a meeting you can follow along and ask a few questions.
BIST saves labor for the Automatic Test Equipment (ATE).
Though there’s no free lunch. BIST does require an engineer to labor—someone has to design it specific to the device under test (DUT). [Read more…]
In the beginning– just test the specs.
Analog circuits have been around a long time. Consider a simple LRC circuit– the inputs and outputs are continuous wave forms.
This remains a key differentiator from digital circuits which operate on 1’s and 0’s.
Continuous waveforms require different test equipment and test techniques. Analog circuits have properties of impedance, 3Db points in the frequency domain, transform functions. They can be treated like a lumped circuit or a distributed circuit in which signal integrity and transmission line theory apply.
So testing is easy- you just test the specs. [Read more…]