VLSI and Analog Circuit Testing

As transistors shrink and chips grow more complex, verifying that a manufactured circuit actually behaves as designed becomes one of the hardest practical problems in computer engineering. VLSI and analog circuit testing encompasses the methods used to detect manufacturing defects—from scan-based techniques that serialize internal state for inspection, to built-in self-test schemes that embed diagnostic logic directly on the chip, to compression strategies that reduce the enormous volumes of test data that modern designs demand. Analog circuits add particular difficulty, since their faults often manifest as subtle parametric deviations rather than clean logical errors, making automated diagnosis far less straightforward than in the digital domain. Active research is pushing toward testing that consumes less power during the test process itself, scales efficiently to systems-on-chip built from reusable embedded cores, and compresses test vectors aggressively enough to remain practical as device complexity continues to outpace test infrastructure.

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Keywords

Test Data CompressionEmbedded CoresScan TestingAnalog Circuit Fault DiagnosisBIST SchemeTest Access Architecture