Spare Parts in Analog Circuits: a Filter Example

Spare parts technique has been widely used in digital designs. As memory cells are more susceptible to defects and faults than logic cells, redundancy has been extensively used for enhancing defect and fault tolerance through repair by spare replacement. The technique also aims yield increase, and points to be a very good solution since density integration gets ever higher. In this work, we propose the use of spare parts to develop reliable analog circuits, thus increasing fault tolerance by choosing among many identical blocks, the best ones that will compose the circuit. An example using a mixed-signal FIR filter is presented, showing that the technique can easily be adapted to help increase yield of analog circuits, too.

[1]  Yong-Bin Kim,et al.  Optimal spare utilization in repairable and reliable memory cores , 2003, Records of the 2003 International Workshop on Memory Technology, Design and Testing.

[2]  A. W. M. van den Enden,et al.  Discrete Time Signal Processing , 1989 .

[3]  A. Diaz-Sanchez,et al.  VLSI voltage mode FIR analog adaptive filters , 1996, Proceedings of the 39th Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[4]  Alan B. Grebene,et al.  Analog Integrated Circuit Design , 1978 .

[5]  John M. Khoury,et al.  Continuous-time MOSFET-C filters in VLSI , 1986 .

[6]  Z. Ciota,et al.  Analogue realisation of integrated FIR filters , 1996 .

[7]  M. P. Flynn,et al.  Digital calibration incorporating redundancy of flash ADCs , 2003, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. II Express Briefs.

[8]  L. Carro,et al.  Statistical acquisition for embedded instrumentation , 2004, Proceedings of the 21st IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37510).

[9]  G. Fischer.  Analog FIR filters by switched-capacitor techniques , 1990 .

[10]  Alan V. Oppenheim,et al.  Discrete-time signal processing (2nd ed.) , 1999 .

[11]  David A. Johns,et al.  Analog Integrated Circuit Design , 1996 .

[12]  Bram Nauta,et al.  A CMOS transconductance-C filter technique for very high frequencies , 1992 .

[13]  E. Burlingame,et al.  An analog CMOS high-speed continuous-time FIR filter , 2000, Proceedings of the 26th European Solid-State Circuits Conference.

[14]  Luigi Carro,et al.  Robust low-cost analog signal acquisition with self-test capabilities , 2004, 19th IEEE International Symposium on Defect and Fault Tolerance in VLSI Systems, 2004. DFT 2004. Proceedings..

[15]  W.R. Moore,et al.  A review of fault-tolerant techniques for the enhancement of integrated circuit yield , 1986, Proceedings of the IEEE.