Sinusoidal signal generation for production testing and BIST applications

Abstract

A novel technique to generate spectrally pure sinusoidal signals is proposed. The technique provides a dramatic improvement in spectral performance compared to the existing state of the art. With the proposed approach, spectral performance is inherently robust to variation in operating frequency and spectral characterization is programmable over frequencies. A circuit using extremely low cost operational amplifiers and 5 % accurate passive components has been built that can generate a sine wave with THD of lesser than -100dB at frequency, f=2.737 KHz .

On-chip sinusoidal signal generation with harmonic cancelation for analog and mixed-signal BIST applications

“…This is an advantage compared to previously presented generators using harmonic cancelation such as [6,7,18]. These previous works are based on matching different stages for the generation of time-delayed signals, so any mismatch between the stages has a negative impact on the harmonic cancellation.…”

“…Some recent proposals for sinusoidal signal generation combine a closed-loop oscillator and a harmonic cancellation technique to provide highly linear sinusoidal signals [6,7,18]. These techniques are based on the fact that adding time-shifted versions of a periodic waveform it is possible to cancel some of the harmonic components in the original waveform.…”

“…On the other hand, the approach in [7,18] is based on combining the outputs of a phase-shift oscillator. The work demonstrates that by properly weighting and summing the output signals of a phase-shift oscillator, it is possible to obtain sinusoids with a very low harmonic distortion.…”

Sinusoidal signal generation for mixed-signal BIST using a harmonic-cancellation technique

“…A number of different strategies for analog signal generation have been published for the last years [1]- [7].…”

“…Some recent proposals for signal generation [6], [7] combine a closed-loop oscillator and a harmonic cancellation technique to provide very low THD sinusoidal signals. Our proposed generation technique makes use of a similar harmonic cancellation strategy, but instead of an oscillator, we propose the use of the efficient methodology for sine-wave generation presented by the authors in [1].…”