Abstract
A systemic analysis was chosen to evaluate a real case Bluetooth (BT) radio failure in the aspects of RF communication, digital design, firmware, application software, semiconductor device physics and processing, and failure analysis. This paper explores the range of testing, including customer application testing, required to confirm and localize a BT RF communication failure. It shows that the radio communication failure was not, as expected, caused by faulty radio hardware; it was rather linked to problematic encryption hardware at the assistance of the Synergy BT to mobile application. The paper also explores that the digital fault can only be detected by the timing sensitive transition fault scan patterns and how to obtain the physical failure location. Thus, the combination of ATPG and application testing provides a consistency between electrical diagnostics which yields a higher success rate at subsequent physical failure analysis of complex modern RF System on a Chip.
