An Integrated Heated Testbench for Characterizing High Temperature ICs

Abstract

This paper presents a newly developed integrated heating system, which can keep the IC under test at a constant temperature of up to 250 ◦C. The heating system can be used while the IC under test is mounted on its custom-designed interface board, which controls the two supply voltages and provides connectivity to an FPGA. Using a testing framework on the FPGA, the test stimuli and operating clock can be provided with at least 100 MHz. Thus, it is possible to fully vary all three parameters—frequency, voltage, and temperature—during continuous operation of the IC. A case study is performed with a previously fabricated ASIC to test the proposed system.