TABLE OF CONTENTS In the last few years, radiofrequency (RF) testing has been gaining importance in industry as more wireless devices are getting infused into the consumer market. However, RF testing is not well understood among engineers because of the various new considerations present in RF testing compared to digital, analog, or mixed-signal testing. Testing RF devices often requires special skills and knowledge of a different set of instruments to successfully perform measurements. Little has been done to bridge this gap so far and as a result, test needs for RF devices are mostly met by in-house training of employees or hiring external vendors to develop and perform the tests.
This chapter explores RF testing in general and points to various aspects that need to be considered to make consistent measurements be it on the bench or in production. We first discuss RF test methods for specifications of circuit components as well as complex system level specifications such as I-Q imbalance, modulation error ratio, and bit error rate (BER). For advanced readers, we further describe innovative test methods proposed by researchers in this domain. We describe common RF instrumentation used in bench and production testing such as spectrum analyzer, network analyzer, and noise figure meter to familiarize the reader with their functional details.
Noise is an important factor in RF measurements, and thus we give special emphasis to noise figure measurement. In addition, we explore issues...
