Alternate Test Methodology for High Speed A/D Converter Testing on Low Cost Tester

This paper proposes a test methodology for dynamic specification testing of high-speed A/D converters on a low cost tester using the alternate test approach. In the proposed approach, regression-based mapping functions are generated, using specification data of the device from bench testing. During production testing, the dynamic specifications of the device are estimated on a low cost ATE using an alternate test set-up and the pre-developed mapping functions. As opposed to the conventional method of dynamic specification testing of A/D converters, the proposed approach does not require a spectrally pure sinusoidal input signal and estimates device SNR in presence of sampling clock jitter. Simulation results indicate specification estimation error of less than 4% using the proposed test methodology.