Methodology for Improving High-Power Harmonic Measurement Accuracy and Stability

Abstract

With continued dimension scaling of the semiconductor devices, the parasitic parameters become increasingly obvious and it affects the device performance directly. The harmonic distortion is one of the key factors to limit the RF system bandwidth resource and channel capability. Therefore, it is crucial to precisely extract the nonlinear index of the device and system. High-precision harmonic distortion extraction on a device’s intrinsic characteristics could be beneficial not only to device modeling but also to circuit design. However, the harmonic distortion measurement is highly sensitive to the peripheral circuit and instrumentations, especially in high power stimulus; its repeatability and stability are also hard to control. This paper aims to contribute to the subject by extending the measurement methodology, combining isolation compensation with a dual trace phase tuning (DTPT) technique to obtain the optimal harmonic value. As shown by the experiment results, the optimized approach could achieve high measurements of both accuracy and stability. The proposed methodology is validated with measurement data and compared with conventional measurement architecture. The assessment results prove that the proposed methodology could improve 30.66% and 28.84% measurement accuracy both on second and third harmonics. Simultaneously, the proposed methodology decreases gauge repeatability and reproducibility (GRR) from 56.49% to 7.13%.