This chapter has ranged rather summarily over the testing requirements of autonomous analogue-only circuits and A-to-D and D-to-A converters, the vast majority of which will be off the shelf standard parts or standard designs. The difficulty is the very wide diversity of circuits and applications involved, see Figure 7.5, and the detailed specialist knowledge of analogue circuit design which is necessary to discuss the specification, the design and the tolerancing of most circuits in any depth. Also, all analogue circuits have an acceptable tolerance of performance in the time and frequency domain which must be part of the testing specification for the circuit, and hence simple deterministic go/no-go tests are difficult to formulate.As we have seen, functional testing of such circuits is the norm, using commercial instrumentation to generate test inputs and monitor test response. The vendor will inevitably be highly involved in the production testing of standard parts, using considerable resources and in-house expertise; the OEM will generally be involved in less comprehensive functional tests of individual components or parts.

Inspec keywords: digital-analogue conversion; mixed analogue-digital integrated circuits; VLSI; integrated circuit testing; analogue circuits; analogue-digital conversion; CMOS analogue integrated circuits

Other keywords: D-to-A converters; commercial instrumentation; CMOS digital circuits; production testing; OEM; analogue circuit testing design; in-house expertise; A-to-D converters

Subjects: Analogue circuit design, modelling and testing