DSP-Based Mutual Testing for Automotive and Industrial ICs

In this paper, we use the idea of mutual testing to solve the problem of in-field testing. The SoC used in modern automotive and industrial electronics are complex and contain multiple instances of memories, processor cores, and analog and mixed-signal cores. Built-in Self-Test is commonly used to perform in-field testing of the ICs. In the proposed scheme, tests are applied to multiple instances of the on-chip cores and their responses are compared. If the responses are not “identical” an error is likely to be present in the SoC. We describe the use of one-dimensional Discrete Wavelet Transform for performing real-time comparison. Our technique is applicable to both digital and analog testing.