Low Cost Testing of Quadruple Band GSM RFCMOS SOC

Modern RF integrated SOC (system on a chip) are becoming increasingly more complex as more and more functions are being integrated on-chip. This is driving the test cost to be higher due to increased design complexity, resulting in greater tester complexity and longer tests times. In this paper, we will describe how we have implemented a low cost multi-site RF test solution for the industry´s first single-chip 90 nm RFCMOS GSM transceiver with integrated cellular base-band modem [1,2]. We will illustrate novel methods of performing a Gaussian minimum shift keying (GMSK) spectrum mask test and phase trajectory error (PTE) test as defined in the GSM transmitter specifications. We also demonstrate receiver signal measurements such as gain, received IQ amplitude and phase imbalance, and noise figure (NF) for a GSM receiver. The driving motivation for this work is to enable the use of low cost multi-site testers for RF applications with high test stability and throughput in a production environment.