Automatic test system for characterizing radio frequency amplifiers

The competition within the semiconductor industry keeps pushing all the characterization and testing procedures into automation, which saves human operation costs and errors. This thesis develops an automatic testing system that can be used in the characterization of Infineon Radio Frequency (RF) Low Noise Amplifiers (LNA). The system is based on the National Instruments PXI products. This thesis covers the development of the device interface board and the software that is used to control the PXI system. This thesis demonstrates the automatic characterization using this system for three fundamental parameters of RF LNAs – the Scattering Parameters (S-parameters), 1dB Compression Point (P1dB) and Third-Order Intercept Point (IP3).