Multitone digital signal based test for RF receivers

This paper presents a new method for testing radio frequency (RF) receivers that utilizes a multitone digital signal generation scheme and relies on the analysis of the receiver baseband output to compute the RF performance parameters. The proposed method takes out the cost of expensive RF instrumentation on the input side of receiver testing and only requires the less expensive baseband digitization at the receiver output. The complexity of the RF signal generation inherent to standard methods is traded off with extensive signal processing on the baseband side, with the tedious analysis necessary for tackling the problem being addressed and presented herein. While the proposed test scheme was implemented and experimentally verified on a load board for testing UHF receivers, generalized use in BIST applications in need of multi-GHz RF stimuli is also discussed in the paper. RF performance parameters like Gain, Noise Figure (NF), and IIP3 were measured using both standard methods and the proposed method and, the results are shown to be accurate.