A Low-Noise Amplifier with Integrated Current and Power Sensors for RF BIST Applications

In this paper, the design and experimental results of the fully integrated CMOS current sensors and power sensors for RF built-in self-test (BIST) applications are presented. By utilizing a standard 0.18-mum CMOS process, a 5-GHz RF LNA incorporated with the on-chip sensors is fabricated for demonstration. With the proposed BIST technique, the circuit parameters of the LNA including the dc current, forward gain and gain compression can be extracted while maintaining only negligible performance degradation for the device under test (DUT) at multi-gigahertz frequencies.