6.1 Introduction

The current trend of RF SoC devices has grown from early discrete lumped designs to high levels of integration. With the advent of new, more complex modulation and test requirements, test engineers are forced to make decisions about the hardware used to test these DUTs. Traditionally, these types of decisions were straightforward, due to the low levels of complexity of DUTs, in that test engineers had to choose from standard commercial off-the-shelf instruments, akin to bench testing setups.

This mode of operation worked for a long period of time, but when SoC DUTs started becoming increasingly more integrated, production test equipment had to undergo a paradigm shift [1]. When older discrete DUTs shifted from commercial off-the-shelf instruments, ATE became the platform most suited for testing complex SoC DUTs in a production environment. This paradigm shift forced both ATE vendors and test engineers to broadly consider the test equipment setup that provides the maximum test coverage for a wide variety of SoC DUTs.

The focus of this chapter will be on the use, advantages, disadvantages, and setup of commonly used production test equipment hardware. This consists of the components of SoCATE as well as hardware making up focused RF testers. Both discrete RF devices and highly integrated devices with RF front ends are discussed. Also illustrated are the complex factors that must be addressed to develop a successful production test equipment solution. After reading this chapter test engineers will be able to formulate a comparative...