Prototyping of measurement setups for testing baseband communication chips

In this paper three illustrative full-custom baseband chips together with the respective testing methods and measuring setups are presented. The described circuits contain (among other elements) discrete-time switched-capacitor finite impulse response (SC FIR) filters. These filters operating in the baseband frequency range exhibit many important advantages such as low-power and high precision. As a result of several projects it occurred evident that modern FPGA systems such as NanoBoard2 development kit can effectively be used to program and test the described chips. Using NanoTalk language we can rapidly prototype fast and complex structures including generators of complex clock signals. This freshly designed system uses modern and complex FPGA chips like Spartan-3 by Xilinx and Cyclone II by Altera. In result, the designer skill and experience supported with advantages of modern designing environments, DSP, FPGA, CPLD structures and microcontrollers make it possible to design and realize precise measurement setups with clock systems for test and control of advanced multiphase (also multirate) switched-capacitor systems.