Abstract:

As semiconductor technology continues to advance, increasingly more emphasis is being placed on the analog-digital interface. Accuracy performance of analog to digital and digital to analog converters is increasing to a level reaching or exceeding the capability limits of testing equipment.  Increasingly more analog and mixed-signal functions are deeply embedded in complex ICs. At the same time, lowing-price pressure is continuously shrinking the test budget and test resources. Furthermore, mission critical applications, such as aerospace and automotive, pose more stringent test requirements for better reliability and functional safety. 

In this talk, we will briefly review recent analog and mixed-signal IC developments and the associated electronic testing challenges. We will then describe how system identification and signal processing techniques can be applied in the electronic testing area to create breakthrough mixed-signal test solutions. These innovative test solutions can dramatically improve the test efficiency for data converters and can make impossible tasks possible. Compared to the state of the art IEEE test methods, these new solutions can reduce the test time by 10s or 100s of times, or relax the instrumentation requirements by 100s or 1000s of times. Because of the relaxed requirements, the new solutions are also suitable for on-chip implementation with little or no overhead.  These results were independently validated in industry labs or in production test at Texas Instruments, NXP, and Maxim.

Short Bio:

Degang Chen received his BS degree in instrumentation and automation from Tsinghua University in 1984 and his PhD degree in control theory from UC Santa Barbara in 1992. 

He was the John R. Pierce Instructor at CalTech in 1992. After that, he joined Iowa State University where he is currently Professor of Electrical Engineering and the Jerry Junkins Chair in the College Engineering. His industry experience includes Beijing Institute of Control Engineering in 1984-1986, the Boeing Company in 1999 summer, Maxim Integrated in 2001 summer, and Texas Instruments in 2011, 2012 and 2014 summers. His current research interests are in analog and mixed-signal IC design and testing, integrated sensor design, analog verification, and built-in self-test self-calibration for enhancing performance and reliability.

Dr. Chen has authored and co-authored 10 patents and over 280 refereed publications in leading journals and top international conferences. Of those, 15 received best paper awards and other honors. He has frequently delivered technical seminars at leading semiconductor companies such as Texas Instruments, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, IBM, Infineon, NVidia, Xilinx, etc., as well as at various universities.

Dr. Chen is a Fellow of the IEEE, and is an IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society Distinguished Lecture.