IC Tester Project Survey

[Cole_PLTW]

This is not spam, but rather a survey for my senior project. My group and I are going to design a circuit that tests the gates of an IC to see if they are working. Please answer this survey if you can.
1. Have you ever worked with ICs?
2. Have you ever had an IC malfunction?
3. Were you able to determine the problem with the IC?
4. Have you ever had to rebuild a circuit because you couldn’t figure out the problem?
5. Would you be willing to pay for a device that identifies each gate of an IC?

 

[dick_freebird]

1) Umm, yeah. Designed about 50, used many, many more.
2) Sure.
3) Usually. Sometimes using the full resources of an old-school
(not fabless) semiconductor company's reliability lab.
4) Not that I recall.
5) You seem to be focused on digital logic and probably SSI
functions. Nothing here speaks to me as an analog / power
management type guy. And digital has mostly moved on to
very high levels of integration where 99.999% of gates are
not directly pin-accessible - only through elaborate JTAG
chains or proprietary scan paths, or very long vector sets,
any of which require intimate knowledge of the internals.
Short answer? No, not really; anything small enough for the
tester I imagine based on your description to handle, is
cheap enough to just plug in another and see if it works
same or different.
6) I think I've seen low-end component testers as your
description indicates, at distributors like Digi-Key or
Jameco (I forget, didn't buy those either). I do suggest
you attempt to scope out your existing competition and
do it before you commit resources to this development.
But I guess as it's just a project, maybe there is no need
to succeed in an open market, just to prove a point and
move on? Does your professor value such competitive
analysis (industry depends on it)? Or is this only to
demonstrate your hardware / software skills in a very
specific way?
7) For logic, consider that this could already be had by very
low cost USB-DIO equipment and need only some smart
software to run it and make the determination of form
and proper pin / gate function.

 

[Audioguru]

I designed a fairly complicated audio equalizer for a new speaker so its deviations from a flat frequency response were corrected. The product was manufactured. Each one was thoroughly tested for accurate frequency response of the peaks and nulls, distortion, noise and power supply current.
Tens of thousands were produced using a TL074 quad audio opamp and only two failed. One had its IC mounted backwards and the other had a bad electrolytic capacitor. The analog quad opamps, many film capacitors and many carbon film resistors worked perfectly. More than one year later not one was returned for replacement under warranty.

I designed some very complicated custom logic circuits but only one of each was made and sold. They all worked perfectly for years.