An RF BIST Architecture for Output Stages of Multistandard Radios

Emanuel Dogaru (1) , Filipe Vinci dos Santos (1) , William Rebernak (2)

1 Chaire Conception Analogique Avancée Thales/Supélec
2 Thales Communications [Colombes]

Software defined radios (SDR) platforms are in-creasingly complex systems which combine great flexibility and high performance. These two characteristics, together with highly integrated architectures make production test a challenging task. In this paper, we introduce an Radio Frequency (RF) Built-in Self-Test (BIST) strategy based on Periodically Nonuniform Sampling of the signal at the output stages of multistandard radios. We leverage the I/Q ADC channels and the DSP resources to extract the bandpass waveform at the output of the power amplifier (PA). Analytical expressions and simulations show that our time-interleaved conversion scheme is sensitive to time-skew. We show a time-skew estimation technique that allows us to surmount this obstacle. Simulation results show that we can effectively reconstruct the bandpass signal of the output stage using this architecture, opening the way for a complete RF BIST strategy for multistandard radios. Future developments will be focused on an efficient mapping to hardware of our new time-skew estimation for TIADC bandpass conversion.

Mots clés: BIST; Periodically nonuniform sampling; software radios; SDR; mixed-signal test; undersampling

Domaines: Micro et nanotechnologies/Microélectronique

Emanuel Dogaru, Filipe Vinci dos Santos, William Rebernak. An RF BIST Architecture for Output Stages of Multistandard Radios. Military Communications and Information Systems Conference 2013, Oct 2013, Saint Malo, France. 6 p. ⟨hal-00839333⟩