A Built-In Self-Test structure for measuring gain and 1-dB compression point of Power Amplifier

This paper proposes a Built-In Self-Test (BIST) structure for measuring the gain and the 1-dB compression point of the Power Amplifier (PA) in transceiver ICs. In this structure, it is not necessary to use the external devices for mapping and DC measuring because of linearity of blocks, comparative performance in the linear region and the digital representation of the 1-dB compression point and gain value. The BIST Circuit is designed and simulated in 180 nm RF-CMOS process with Spectre-RF for a 900 MHz PA while it can achieve an acceptable accuracy which the input referred 1-dB compression point and gain value can be obtained with an error of about 0.2 dBm and 0.18 dB, respectively and the testing time is about 25 µs depends on resolution. Finally, in order to verify the proposed approach, we implemented practically a similar discrete circuit as proof-of-concept prototype that it obtained input referred 1-dB compression point value with an error of about 0.15 dBm.