Adam WAKS soutiendra sa thèse le 28 juin à 10h00 dans l'Amphi JP.DOM du Laboratoire IMS, sur le sujet : "Built-in Design for Test strategies for phase testing in 5G Transceivers".

The aim of this work is to significantly improve the test coverage of the Fifth Generation Cellular Networks despite the fact that the test equipment is not available. The objective is to implement and evaluate a Design for Test strategy to address the phase measurement of Phased Array transceivers operating at millimeter-wave frequencies. The work describes the problem with direct Radio Frequency testing at high frequencies, and explains the short comings of previous work addressing this issue. Three different Built-in Test Equipment architectures are proposed and realized to characterize the phase through DC measurements. One architecture utilizes a latch to tune two adjacent channels to the same initial phase for coherency. The other two are implemented with Mixers to down-convert the RF signal to DC. An algorithm is developed and implemented in order to drastically reduce the implementation complexity of the Built-in Test Equipment. Both of the solutions are able to characterize the relative phase performance of the IC, and one of the architectures is also addressing the absolute phase measurements of Phased Arrays. This is to the author's knowledge, the first work to address the absolute phase and phase alignment of transceiver channels through a Built-in Test Equipment. The test-architectures occupy a silicon area of 0.0195 mm^2 for the phase alignment, 0.026 mm^2 for the relative phase measurement only, and 0.0648 mm^2 for the relative and absolute phase measurement solution. The Built-in Test Equipment can be used to drastically reduce testing time, and as a test enabler to reduce the cost of expensive test equipment at final test.