Test and Calibration of RF Circuits Using Built-in Non-intrusive Sensors

Summary form only given. Testing the RF functions of mixed-signal Systems-on-Chip is responsible for a very large fraction of the overall test cost. In addition, RF circuits, when designed in the most advanced technologies (e.g. 65nm and beyond), typically require some calibration mechanisms so as to guarantee a high yield. Built-in test structures is a promising approach to facilitate test and calibration of RF circuits. However, tapping into RF signal paths may seriously degrade the performances and certainly necessitates co-designing the RF circuit together with the built-in test circuitry to meet the desired performance trade-off. This challenge finds the designers rather reluctant to adopt a built-in test approach. In this work, we develop a non-intrusive built-in test approach based on sensors that are totally transparent to the RF circuit. In particular, we show how performance deviations can be implicitly predicted by sensors that monitor process variations (e.g. Variation-aware sensors) and how defects can be detected by temperature sensors. In addition, we show that the variation-aware sensors can be used for calibrating the RF circuit in one-shot, that is, without requiring a test/calibration loop.