Fault Based Testing of Low Noise Amplifier

This paper presents a cost effective Embedded Test Circuit (ETC) for single ended Low Noise Amplifiers (LNA).The ETC operation is based on the observation that the presence of catastrophic faults, like resistive bridging, shorts and opens, or parametric faults, result in the attenuation of the output voltage amplitude (gain reduction). It unifies the benefits of reduced Automatic Test Equipment (ATE) complexity of defect based approaches. The ETC along with a single ended LNA has been designed in a 0.35μm CMOS technology using CADENCE tool to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach and experimental results are presented.