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The increasingly more sophisticated systems that are nowadays implemented on a single chip are placing stringent requirements on the test industry. New test strategies, equipment, and methodologies need to be developed to sustain the constant increase in demand for consumer and communication electronics. Techniques for built-in-self-test (BIST) and design-for-test (DFT) strategies have been proven to offer more feasible and economical testing solutions. / Previous works have been conducted to perform on-chip testing, characterization, and measurement of signals and components. The current thesis advances those techniques on many levels. In terms of performance, an increase of more than an order of magnitude in speed is achieved. 70-GHz (effective sampling) on-chip oscilloscope is reported, compared to 4-GHz and 10-GHz ones in previous state-of-the-art implementations. Power dissipation is another area where the proposed work offer a superior solution compared to previous alternatives. All the proposed circuits do not exceed a few milliWatts of power dissipation, while performing multi-GHz high-speed signal capture at a medium resolution. Finally, and possibly most importantly, all the proposed circuits for test rely on a different form of signal processing; the time-based approach. It is believed that this approach paves the path to a lot of new techniques and circuit design skills that can be investigated more deeply. As an integral part of the time-based processing approach for GHz signal capture, this thesis verifies the advantages of using time amplification. The use of such amplification in the time domain is materialized with experimental results from three specific integrated circuits achieving different tasks in GHz high-speed in-situ signal measurement and characterization. Advantages of using such time-based approach techniques, when combined with the use of a front-end time amplifier, include noise immunity, the use of synthesizable digital cells, and circuit building blocks that track the technology scaling in terms of area and speed.

FFT-based tests (e.g. gain, distortion, SNR, etc.) from a device-under-test (DUT) exhibit normal distributions when the measurement is repeated many times. Hence, a statistical approach to evaluate the accuracy of these measurements is traditionally applied. The noise in a DSP-based mixed-signal test system severely limits its measurement accuracy. Moreover, in high-speed sampled-channel applications the jitter-induced noise from the DUT and test equipment can severely impede accurate measurements. / A new digitizer architecture and post-processing methodology is proposed to increase the measurement accuracy of the DUT and the test equipment. An optimal digitizer design is presented which removes any measurement bias due to noise and greatly improves measurement repeatability. Most importantly, the presented system improves accuracy in the same test time as any conventional test. / An integrated mixed-signal test core was implemented in TSMC's 0.18 mum mixed-signal process. Experimental results obtained from the mixed-signal integrated test core validate the proposed digitizer architecture and post processing technique. Bias errors were successfully removed and measurement variance was improved by a factor of 5.

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