Effective and Economic Phase Noise Testing for Single-Chip TV Tuners

Phase noise testing for TV tuners is time consuming and expensive because of the large number of TV channels. This paper presents a hierarchical simulation method for a complex single-chip TV tuner. Based on the simulation results, an effective and economic test method is proposed to save the test application time. This method determines the most effective channels and frequencies to test so that the number of phase noise measurements is reduced. Experimental results on commercial chips show that our proposed method reduces the test time by a factor of ten without test escapes.