Bluetooth RF Front End Design Verification

Abstract

In the design and performance evaluation of radio communication systems, it is necessary to have an accurate characterization of RF front end. Front end is an important part of the design. It has Band Pass Filter, Power Amplifier, Low Noise Amplifier, Tx-Rx switch and matching network. Filter non-idealities, nonlinearity of power amplifier, phase noise of oscillator. Consequently, desired performance of the whole design is degraded. To improve degraded performance, it is necessary to know what exactly is causing the problem. This is the reason why characterization of RF Front End is essential. RF Characterization of front end supports various tests. These tests can be di- vided in two parts: Transmitter tests and Receiver tests. Transmitter tests involve tests like Transmit output power, transmitter spectral and modulation characteris- tics, Out of Band Transmission, etc. At receiver side, tests like Receiver Sensitivity and BER calculation are required. Nonlinearity, phase and gain imbalance, DC offsets, spurious tones, phase noise, etc. are degrading factors of radio transmitter. DEVM degradation due to oscillator leakage was observed as an issue in a project, the issue is described in detail and how the problem was solved. To accomplish this task of testing chips automation via scripts plays an important role. Mainly python and perl are used to automate the tests. The scripts used for debugging the DEVM baseline degradation were made in perl and are discussed in detail with owchart in the report.