High-speed measuring system for testing mixed-signal-LSI performance and its application to digital-noise measurement

An automatic measuring system is developed for laboratory use for performance testing and design verification of analog and mixed-signal LSIs. Through the high-speed circuit and board design techniques, an 8-bit 1 GHz arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) and 3 GHz sampling waveform digitizer (SWD) were implemented in the system. This enables the range for measuring high-frequency mixed-signal-LSI performance to be extended from MHz up to GHz. A statistical digital-noise measurement method is presented as an application of the system. The digital-noise performance is automatically analyzed on the system by measuring and processing the statistical output results of the on-chip analog comparators operating on a mixed-signal LSI in order to detect the digital-noise coupling.<
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