Built-in test of millimeter-Wave circuits based on non-intrusive sensors

This paper addresses the high-volume production test problem for millimeter-wave (mm-Wave) circuits. Bit error rate testing is the only feasible solution nowadays for mm-Wave transceivers, but is extremely costly and challenging to be implemented in high-volume production test floors. The lack of alternative solutions is due to the difficulty in extracting off-chip and processing mm-Wave frequencies. In this paper, we propose a built-in test solution that has two important attributes. First, it is based on non-intrusive sensors that are totally transparent to the mm-Wave circuit. They monitor variations in the performances of the mm-Wave circuit indirectly by virtue of offering an “image” of process variations. Second, the non-intrusive sensors operate at DC or low-frequency, thus dramatically simplifying the test of the mm-Wave circuit. We demonstrate the concept on a 65nm 60GHz mm-Wave low-noise amplifier (LNA).