Introduction:

Advances in semiconductor technology have enabled the integration of digital, mixed-signal, and RF systems on a single chip. While Systems on a Chip (SoCs) offer many benefits in cost and performance, they pose significant challenges for testing after manufacture. Trends in technology as well as applications which pose problems for conventional test will be described. A novel approach which uses the computational resources of an SoC to test itself will be described as a way to deal with emerging test problems. Techniques to test the embedded digital, analog and RF modules in the SoC will be discussed.
Results of simulations and measurements on prototype hardware and chips show that the approach can predict the specifications of the modules with high accuracy, pointing towards a new direction for low-cost manufacturing test of future products.

Bio:

Jacob A. Abraham is Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Professor of Computer Sciences at the University of Texas at Austin. He is also the director of the Computer Engineering Research Center and holds a Cockrell Family Regents Chair in Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Stanford University in 1974.
His research interests include VLSI design and test, formal verification, and fault-tolerant computing. He has published extensively and has been included in a list of the most cited researchers in the world. He has supervised more than 80 Ph.D. dissertations, and is particularly proud of the accomplishments of his students, many of whom occupy senior positions in academia and industry. He has been elected Fellow of the IEEE as well as Fellow of the ACM, and is the recipient of the 2005 IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award.