A Level-Crossing Approach for the Analysis of RF Modulated Signals Using Only Digital Test Resources

Abstract

The test of analog & RF circuits at wafer-level suffers from both quality and throughput limitations, especially due to probing issues and limited count of expensive instrumentation resources. Since final test after packaging guarantees product performances, constraints on wafer-level test can be relaxed. This paper investigates a signal acquisition protocol based on the use of digital tester channels to perform the demodulation of analog/RF signals. Due to the large availability of such hardware resources on most testers, this approach allows to setup a multi-site strategy, thus increasing the test throughput. The fundamental concept is to capture the signal through the 1-bit comparator available in a digital tester channel and to process the resulting bit stream to retrieve the analog/RF signal characteristics. In this paper, the proposed solution is illustrated for the demodulation of Frequency-Modulated (FM) and Amplitude-Modulated (AM) signals. Both simulation and experimental results obtained with a Verigy 93K platform are presented.