| The explosive growth of RF/Microwave IC industry has made the testing of RF/Microwave applications very challenging, particularly under the constraints of high quality and low price. Embedded test is a potential solution to face the challenges posed to RF/Microwave IC test, in which low-cost testers, already on the factory floor, can be applied to perform RF/Microwave ICs testing with additional design for test (DFT) circuitry integrated with the IC under test, instead of costly advanced ATE system with RF functions.;The fundamental idea is to move very high-speed test functions on-chip, thus reducing the requirement and the cost of the external ATE. This move, however, is not that simple, and still in the development stage.;The basis of the proposed wireless embedded test is an off-wafer (chip) tester plus some test circuitry integrated with the device-under-test (DUT). The on-wafer (chip) test circuit receives a signal from the external signal source, modifies it into a suitable test stimulus for the DUT, and then extracts the useful information from the response of the DUT into baseband signals, which are finally transmitted back to the external tester. The external tester and antenna are needed for sending the initial RF signals without any physical interconnection to the DUT and receiving the low-speed test response from the DUT by low-frequency wire connections. Thereby, the necessary on-chip components of the proposed embedded test are an antenna, power and high frequency rectification and sensing circuitry.;First, the design and implementation of an RF RMS detector for embedded test is presented, which is based on a bipolar translinear design methodology. Then single-layer and multi-layer on-chip antennas with different lengths are developed, the performance of which will be compared with the measurement results. Next, CMOS frequency dividers are reviewed, including theoretical analysis of injection locking performance and designs of injection-locking frequency dividers and flip-flop-based frequency divider at 12 GHz and 24 GHz. With the designed on-chip antenna and frequency dividers, a simple microwave test source is built. Finally, the application of the test source is studied and a wireless embedded test scheme for LNA is proposed. |
