Method and systems to measure propagation delay in semiconductor chips

Abstract

A method and systems to evaluate the propagation delay within a semiconductor chip ( ) that is embedded in an electronic system without requiring measurement apparatus and specific electrical contacts is disclosed. Since most of electronic systems use a microprocessor, the basic principle of the invention consists in using the microprocessor capabilities to measure the propagation delay of a chip embedded in such an electronic system. Thus, according to the invention, the microprocessor transmits an instruction to the semiconductor chip that performs propagation delay evaluation and then read the result in a dedicated memory register ( ) of the chip. As a consequence, the chip does not require dedicated pins and measurement apparatus. In order to measure the propagation delay, the chip comprise a logic path ( ) wherein propagation delay is created, then a rising edge detector ( ) is used to analyze logic path signals, A counter ( ) based on a system clock is used to measure propagation delay. The content of the counter is stored in a memory register ( ) of the chip ( ).