Massive Parallel Testing of Mobile Terminal Receivers in a High-Volume Production Environment

This work describes the looping back of a transmitter output signal to many receiver input ports by using the parasitic cross-talk inside the pogo pin area of a spring connector interface. This is a significant contribution for higher throughput in ATE (Automated Test Equipment) cells. The understanding of the pogo interference is also essential to set up a reliable measurement environment and therefore the precondition for the correlation to lab results even in a harsh and noisy high-volume production environment. Moreover, this work demonstrates a proven way to increase the throughput in high-volume production of transceiver chips by data preprocessing inside the RF-IC (Radio Frequency Integrated Circuit). The retrieved results allow the state-of-the-art quad-site testing of a modern RF transceiver IC to be extended to octal site testing and therefore the reduction of test times and costs by >30%.