Post-production performance calibration in analog/RF devices

In semiconductor device fabrication, continual demand for high performance, high yield devices has caused designers to look to post-production tunable circuits as the next logical step in analog/RF design and test development. These approaches have not yet achieved the maturity necessary for industrial adoption, primarily due to complexity and cost. In this work, we develop a general model which systematically outlines several key observations constraining the complexity of performance calibration in analog/RF devices. Moreover, we develop a detailed cost model permitting direct comparison of performance calibration methods to industry standard specification testing. Our analysis is demonstrated on a tunable RF LNA device simulated in 0.18μm RFCMOS.