RF Built-in Self Test of a Wireless Transmitter

Precise Delay Alignment Between Amplitude and Phase/Frequency Modulation Paths in a Digital Polar Transmitter

“…5. The precise sub-CKR clock period alignment within the direct and reference point modulation injection within the ADPLL can also be dealt with using built-in self-test (BIST) techniques with PHE as the quality monitor [18]. If needed, the scheme can also be adapted dynamically using an embedded on-die processor or other available on-chip computational resources.…”

A novel RF phase error Built-in-Self-Test for GSM

“…The DCa is comprised of three different capacitor banks of varying sizes with the first two being used to tune the ADPLL to a specific channel and the last to perform the frequency modulation and fine tuning necessary in GSMIEDGE. The DCO gain characteristics are constantly calibrated using digital logic to achieve the lowest possible distortion of the transmitted waveform [5]. In order to calculate the phase difference that is necessary to correct any problem in the DCO, the clock edges of the reference frequency and the clock edges from the DCa are compared and turned into a digital representation by the time-to-digital-converter (TDC) and then subtracted from the FCW to form the PHE signal.…”

“…The critical test for RF-BiST verification will be the ability for the PHE analysis to correlate to the external spectrum analyzer measurement in its noisiest environment, namely on the automatic tester for production testing. Therefore, the parameters are set to closely mimic the behavior of the input to the spectrum analyzers by adjusting the ADPLL settings for loop filtering and There are numerous benefits of using this internal RF-BiST test as compared to the external RF parametric tests [5,9]. The most obvious one is the test cost reduction.…”

RF BIST for ADPLL-based polar transmitters with wide-band DCO gain calibration

“…However, low-cost self-adaptation and built-in selftest (BIST) solutions for analog/mixed-signal designs, especially those for RF wireless applications, remain as a significant challenge due to the complex analog nature of circuit operation [3] [4]. In this paper, we exploit the digital c o nfig ur a bility o f a r e c e nt dig ita l p o la r tr a ns mitte r a r chitecture, to provide a novel BIST solution aiming at its key performance measure for modulation quality, error vector magnitude (EVM).…”