Phase noise measurement on IF analog signals using standard digital ATE resources

This paper introduces a low-cost technique for phase noise measurement on IF analog signals. The technique is based on signal acquisition from a digital Automated Test Equipment (ATE) and a dedicated post-processing algorithm that permits to reconstruct the time-domain phase of the IF analog signal from the digital capture. An experimental setup is developed to validate the proposed technique and measurements on actual analog signals demonstrate a very good agreement with conventional phase noise measurements.