Signature Driven Hierarchical Post-Manufacture Tuning of RF Systems for Performance and Power

Integration of RF circuits in deeply scaled CMOS technologies and severe process variation in those technology nodes result in poor manufacturing yield. A post-manufacture tuning approach for yield improvement of RF systems is developed in this paper that uses hierarchical behavioral models of the RF systems. The proposed method first determines module-level performances from the system-level response (signature) to an applied test using top-down model diagnosis. Then, constrained optimization is performed to determine the best module-level tuning parameter values that satisfy system-level specifications (bottom-up analysis) in a power-conscious manner. Both top-down and bottom-up analysis techniques are supported by hierarchical RF behavioral models. The relationship between module-level tuning parameters and module-level performance metrics changes from instance to instance depending on amount of process variation and this factor is included in the proposed tuning procedure. A key benefit of the proposed approach is that only a single-test application is needed at a fixed number of tuning knob settings resulting in reduction in tuning time. The efficiency of the proposed technique is demonstrated using simulation results and hardware experiment.