N-stage pipelined Digital to Analog converter testing

Nowadays, mixed analog and digital circuits are of big interest. Digital-to-Analog converters (DACs) are among the main parts of these circuits. Hence, testing the Pipelined DAC (PDAC) is necessary as it is used in many applications. This paper presents a low cost test of a one stage circuit level PDAC. The fault model used in this test consists of catastrophic faults. It is proved that two test inputs are sufficient to detect all faults in this PDAC stage. Based on this result, a general test procedure is developed in order to test an N-stage PDAC. The test procedure was verified using the Eldo simulator provided by Mentor Graphics Corp. on a 90nm MOS model provided by MOSIS.