Testing RF circuits with true non-intrusive built-in sensors

Abdallah,; Stratigopoulos,; Mir,; Altet,

doi:10.1109/date.2012.6176657

Cited by 8 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Especially for RF circuits this objective is hard to satisfy since these circuits are very sensitive and tapping into their signal paths may seriously unbalance the performance trade-offs achieved by design. For example, loop-back test for transceivers [6], [7], [8], [9], where the test signals are generated in the baseband and the transmitter's output is connected to the receiver's input This paper is an invited summary paper on the Ph.D. dissertation work of Louay Abdallah [I] that was earried out at TIMA Laboratory (CNRSGrenoble INP -UJF), Grenoble, Franee, from Oetober 2008 to Oetober 2012 under the supervision of Haralampos-G. Stratigopoulos and Salvador Mir: Parts of this summary paper have been previously published in [2] , [3], [4] , [5]. This summary paper was invited in the framework of the finals of the 2013 IEEE Computer Soeiety Test Teehnology Teehnieal Couneil (TTTC) doetoral thesis award competition that took plaee at the 20 to analyze the test response also in the baseband, requires the insertion of a switch and an attenuator to perform the connection and, for some types of transceivers, even an extra mixer is inserted in the RF signal path.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In the third phase, the output of the sensor may not change when applying an RF stimulus at the input of the LNA or it may exceed the pre-defined limits. In [3], defects were inserted at the layout level in the form of short-and open circuits and it was shown with post-layout simulations that the proposed test scheme achieves perfect defect coverage. The same analysis cannot be shown in our hardware experiment since all fabricated sampies are defect-free.…”

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confidence: 99%

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True non-intrusive sensors for RF built-in test

Abdallah¹,

Stratigopoulos²,

Mir³

2013

2013 IEEE International Test Conference (ITC)

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In this summary paper, we discuss two types of sensors that provide a buHt-in test solution for RF circuits. The key characteristic of the sensors is that they are non-intrusive, in the sense that they are not electrically connected to the RF circuit under test. This has the important advantage that the design of the RF circuit becomes totally independent from the design of the sensors. In other words, the RF circuit design methodology and performance trade-offs are totally transparent to the insertion of the buHt-in test strategy. In particular, we pro pose variation aware sensors to implement an implicit functional test and a temperature sensor to implement a defect-oriented test. The proposed sensors provide DC or low-frequency measurements, thus they have the potential to reduce drastically the test cost.We discuss the principle of operation of the sensors, we provide design guidelines, and we demonstrate the concept on a set of fabricated chips. To the best of our knowledge, tbis is the first proof-of-concept of RF test based on non-intrusive sensors.

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