A low-cost configurability test strategy for an embedded analog circuit

AGUSTIN LAPROVITTA; GABRIELA PERETTI; EDUARDO ROMERO; SAMIHA MOURAD

MICROELECTRONICS JOURNAL

ELSEVIER SCI LTD

Año: 2012 vol. 43 p. 745 - 755

0026-2692

This paper proposes a self-test strategy, analog configurability test (ACT), for an embedded analog configurable circuit (EACC) composed of operational amplifiers and interconnection resources that are present in the MSP430 microcontroller family from Texas Instruments®. The ACT strategy minimizes the cost in hardware overhead by employing only the hardware and software resources of the microcontroller. Our test proposal consists in programming a reduced set of available configurations for the EACC and testing its functionality by measuring only a few key parameters. The processor executes an embedded test routine that sequentially programs the configurations, acquires data from an ADC channel and performs required calculations. The test strategy is experimentally evaluated using a commercial hardware provided by the vendor. Our experimental results show very good repeatability, with errors below the expected.