Rapid Radio Frequency Amplitude and Phase Distortion Measurement Using Amplitude Modulated Stimulus

Abstract

Testing of RF circuits for gain, nonlinearity and distortion specification generally requires the use of multiple test measurements and long test times contributing to increased test cost. Prior RF test methods have suffered from significant test calibration effort (training for supervised learners) when using compact tests or from increased test time due to direct specification measurement. In this paper, a novel RF test methodology is developed that: (a) allows RF devices to be tested for amplitude and phase distortion in test time comparable to what can be achieved using supervised learning techniques while retaining the accuracy of direct specification measurement, (b) allows multiple RF specifications to be determined concurrently from a single data acquisition and (c) does not require any training for accurate test specification computation. The proposed method based on amplitude modulated RF stimulus driven RF distortion extraction is shown to give excellent results across common RF performance metrics (RMS error <1.4%) while providing ~10× improvements in test time compared to previous methods.