Enabling efficient built-in-self-calibration for RFICs

Abstract

Robustness and yield enhancement techniques for RF circuits and systems are gaining accelerating traction due to increased PVT variability in nanometer CMOS. One of the more viable approaches that make use of the increasingly heterogeneous systems is digitally-assisted RF, enabling circuit programmability and flexibility. With the inclusion of the more robust digital, RF circuits' impairments may be successfully overcome or significantly diminished. This is enabled by implementing self-calibration mechanisms on top of self-test routines. In this paper, we highlight the basic requirements for enabling the on-chip self-calibration loop and discuss the main design steps. We also show an LNA circuit example demonstrating self-healing capabilities.

One-Shot Calibration of RF Circuits Based on Non-Intrusive Sensors

“…The second approach consists of integrating the complete calibration mechanism on-chip [10,11,12,13], as shown in Fig. 1(d).…”

Analog and Mixed-Signal Test

“…In such cases, DFT and BIST can be used to support on-line test during normal operation by detecting early reliability hazards and gaining in-sight about environmental conditions that can jeopardize the system's health [29,30,31,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41]. They can also provide valuable feedback for achieving faulttolerance through calibration, tuning, or even reconfigurability [42,43,44,45,46]. Finally, DFT and BIST techniques can provide valuable feedback for diagnosis purposes [47,48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57,58,59].…”