This web page describes the physical test environment of integrated circuits in the UBC VLSI Lab. A description of the test equipment available will be given and the complete testing procedure will be demonstrated by specific examples. The examples include the 74LS165 8-Bit Parallel-to-Serial Shift Register and the 74LS181 4-Bit Arithmetic Logic Unit. Commercial chips have been chosen so that the reader can use the source files from the web page to try the examples on his or her own. The digital testing of ICs is emphasized as only digital examples are given. However, many of the concepts used by digital testing can be applied to analog testing as well and after going through the digital testing material, the reader should have enough understanding of the test equipment to perform analog testing. A small section at the end describes the analog capabilities of the test equipment.
The web page is organized into the following sections:
The Test Equipment section describes the equipment available for physical testing of ICs and the next two sections describe two of these: the HP VXI Test System and the CMC TH1000 Mixed Signal Test Head. The Design Flow section describes the typical digital design flow of a digital IC and shows which steps affect physical testing such as test vectors generation which is discussed in the following section. The two main software tools used for physical testing are described in the next two sections followed by the two examples. Finally, a small section will discuss the issues in the physical testing of analog ICs. All files mentioned throughout the web page can be obtained from the Useful Files section and the last section points to references.
All the test equipment in the UBC VLSI Lab are provided by the Canadian Microelectronics Corporation (CMC). CMC provides two detailed tutorials on the physical testing of both digital and analog ICs. These tutorials can be found in the Useful Files section. It should be noted that the material contained on this web page supplements the material from the tutorials, and does not replace them. The CMC tutorials provide step by step instructions on the use of the equipment and the software but does not go into detail on the testing procedure in general. This web page provides extra information that will allow the reader to understand the complete picture of physical testing.
The material on the web page assumes the reader is familiar with C programming, UNIX, and VHDL. A small Perl script is used in one of the examples but in general, the knowledge of Perl is not required.
Wilson Li (Apr. 1, 1997)