TABLE OF CONTENTS A lot of changes have been made to the methodologies used for testing for distortion in modern RF-containing SoC devices. Many excellent resources are available describing the types of distortion and how to test them. With the recent integration of RF front ends into SoC transceivers, especially in the area of wireless communications, some changes have been made to the fundamentals of distortion testing. In particular, the rise of homodyne, or ZIF, architectures has led to the importance of distortion mechanisms and products that have traditionally been ignored due to past architecture types. This chapter is aimed at enlightening the SoC production test engineer to distortion testing techniques required as the levels of integration continue to increase. However, it can also serve as an updated review of the fundamentals of distortion and distortion testing for all electronic devices in general.
This chapter takes concepts from traditional RF and traditional mixed-signal testing and unites them in one discussion. With the integration levels of today's SoC devices for wireless communications, it is necessary to have a full understanding of how these traditional analog measurements are performed, regardless of whether they are at RF frequencies or baseband frequencies.
The concepts used in performing RF frequency distortion measurements are the same as those used in performing lower frequency distortion tests. Nonlinear properties such as harmonic and intermodulation distortion occur in all real devices. The methods used to determine these properties, and other distortion properties, in devices will be shown in this chapter.
