Concurrent Testing Embedded Systems : Adapting Automatic Control Techniques to Microelectronics Testing

This paper is aimed at exploiting Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) techniques widely known in automatic control for solving online test problem in embedded Integrated Circuits (ICs). Before reaching this aim, we will briefly review the field of microelectronics testing, introducing basic concepts and techniques. We will next introduce FDI model-based approaches and their application for online testing of embedded ICs considering linear systems with potential faults and disturbances. The parity relation-based residual is specially suitable for this type of application. As an example, we will apply it to concurrent fault detection in a digital embedded filter. The proposed scheme will then be illustrated for a linear digital passband elliptic filter.