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A multisine excitation signal enables fast and statistically robust measurement of the nonlinear behavior of analog devices under test. This paper describes the design considerations and constraints of a multisine excitation signal when it is applied to analog-to-digital converter testing. A novel phase-plane uniformity objective function followed by an optimization procedure is proposed to optimize the multisine excitation signal. Performance comparison between the proposed multisine design and other alternative multisine design is carried out. It is demonstrated that the proposed phase-space uniform multisine enables better representation of the conversion error distribution compared with existing multisine designs. This results in a more accurate assessment of the analog-to-digital converter performance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

High-volume production data shows that dies, which failed probe test on a semiconductor wafer, have a tendency to form certain unique patterns, i.e., defect clusters. Identifying such clusters is one of the crucial steps toward improvement of the fabrication process and design for manufacturing. This paper proposes a new technique for defect-cluster identification that combines data mining with a defect-cluster extraction using a Segmentation, Detection, and Cluster-Extraction algorithm. It offers high defect-extraction accuracy, without any significant increase in test time and cost. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]