Design Of Automatic Test Platform For L-Ka Band Radio Frequency Module

Recently years,with the development of science and technology,the electronic product becomes more and more common in every profession area.The circuit system is the most important part of the electronic products and its performance has direct influence on the performances of electronic products.The tradition circuit system test involves people test,it needs more time and work,also it needs more test instruments.it is low level about using test instrument.the test data is initial data,but the user needs the final test data.The tradition test is not flexible.Therefore,the requirement of automatic test of the circuit system is bigger and bigger.People hope to find an easy test way instead of the single and tedious tradition test about many electric circuits system test.The virtual instrument technology is a kind of automatic instrument test technology.It has a big advantage on comparing to the tradition circuit system test.it can fill the requirement of automatic test.According to the signal frequency band,RF is divided into various wavelength.including L segment,S segment,C segment,Ka segment,etc.corresponding to the RF modules of each band.The project of the company has a large number of RF modules from L segment to Ka band that need to be tested,and the domestic and foreign technology development status is studied.There is no specific RF related technology.In this paper,the automatic testing technology based on virtual instrument is studied and applied to the RF module from L to Ka.Specific research on the L-Ka band based automatic test development technology,improve the test accuracy and stability,designed the L-Ka band automatic test platform,can measure the frequency range: the input is 20MHz-18 GHz,output is 1MHz-35 GHz.The testing technologies of L-Ka band RF module were studied and an automatic testing platform for verification.Was been developed.Firstly,the working principle and technical index of L-Ka RF module is studied.The RF module realizes the conversion of input RF signal into output RF signal.L-Ka band RF module mainly completes the transformation from L-band to Ka-band signal interval,and its main RF test indexes include: gain test,1dB compression point test,stray test,phase noise test,frequency response test,etc.This paper studies and analyzes the manual test process of these RF indicators,establishes the manual test process,and completes the demand analysis of the automatic test platform by combining the automatic test technology.Secondly,two software applications in L-Ka band RF module tests technology are analyzed.One is LabVIEW software,a powerful automatic test development platform.One is thestatistical analysis software Minitab,which analyzes the parameters in the test technology.Thirdly,the overall design and hardware design of automatic test platform is studied.In the overall design,the overall test flow and the overall design scheme are analyzed.The overall design is divided into hardware design and software design.The hardware design is based on GPIB bus,including the overall design of hardware,hardware selection and platform construction,instrument communication and determination of various technical parameters of the automatic test platform.Finally,the software design of automatic test platform includes user interface design and function module design.The user interface needs to be tested with a large number of items and a large amount of information.In the functional test module,the automatic test algorithm is studied,and the average algorithm program is added in the gain test,1db compression point test,stray test,phase noise test and frequency response test,which improves the accuracy and stability of the test.In the 1dB compression point test,the stepping cycle algorithm is added to improve the test precision from 0.95 dBc to 0.995 dBc,and the theoretical precision is 1dBc.The debugging process of the automatic test platform is analyzed,and the function indexes are verified by experiments.At present,the automatic test platform has passed the company's actual project acceptance,playing a great role in production and scientific research,a total of more than 6000 sets of test modules.Compared with the manual test platform,the automatic test platform optimizes the test algorithm and improves the test accuracy and stability.Its innovative performance has won small innovation awards and the second prize of efficiency in 2018 years.