Thermal Testing of Analogue Integrated Circuits: A Case Study

This paper discusses the use of temperature as a test observable for analogue circuits, presenting a generic configuration for analogue circuit thermal testing. As a case study, static temperature analysis is performed over a two-stage operational amplifier in view of extracting temperature waveforms at different locations on the circuit under test, both under fault-free conditions as well as in the presence of bridging faults. Exhaustive thermal analysis of all the likely bridging faults is presented, establishing the detectability ratio of this fault set using temperature under different sensing scenarios.