Use of source degeneration for non-intrusive BIST of RF front-end circuits

This paper presents an on-chip BIST technique for a common class of RF communication circuits, which has no measurable impact on the performance of the circuit-under-test. The technique is extremely robust and does not require the use of any DSP cores or off-line processing. The resultant architecture has very low overheads (<4% area overhead), ultra fast test times (30 μs) and can simply be "plugged" into the RF circuit without the need for any co-design. We present the methodology along with associated circuitry and demonstrate its utility in the self-test of a standard cascode LNA.