Calibration and Test Time Reduction Techniques for Digitally-Calibrated Designs: an ADC Case Study

Modern mixed-signal/RF circuits with a digital calibration capability could achieve significant performance improvement through calibration. However, the calibration process often takes a long time--in the order of hundreds of milliseconds or even minutes. As testing such devices would require completion of the calibration process first, lengthy calibration would result in unacceptably long testing time. In this paper, we propose techniques to reduce the calibration time in a production testing environment, and thereby reducing the overall testing time for the digitally-calibrated designs. In particular, we propose DfT modifications to accelerate the underlying adaptation algorithms and to terminate the calibration process as soon as it reaches convergence. We discuss the applicability of our techniques to general digitally-calibrated designs and illustrate the details using a case study of a digitallycalibrated pipelined ADC. Simulation results show that, for the target ADC, the propo...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ET
• Authors: Hsiu-Ming Chang, Kuan-Yu Lin, Kwang-Ting (Tim) Cheng
• Keywords: Calibration, Calibration Process, Digital Calibration, ET 2010, Internet Technology