Wireless Phone Chip Testing

Wireless Phone Chip Testing

Customer Case

A customer makes 900 MHz and 2.1 GHz portable wireless phones using a specific chip that they purchase from a chip manufacturer. To ensure the quality of their product, the company tests each chip to avoid repair and debugging later on in the quality control department.

The chips that they are testing control channel switching. This function is used when the current channel becomes too noisy. They need to simulate data coming from the ADC on the phone and other user inputs, such as channel selection. To do this, they require a digital pattern of 24 bits and another device that can acquire 24-bit wide digital data coming out of the chip under test.

GaGe Case Solution

GaGe recommended a combination of the CompuGen 3250 and CompuScope 3200 for digital testing. The CG3250 is a 32-bit pattern generator, capable of generating at up to 50 MHz with up to 8 MegaSamples of on-board memory for long pattern generation. The CS3200 is a 32-bit logic analyzer card with up to 2 GigaBytes of on-board acquisition memory.

The biggest advantage of these cards is the fact that they can be synchronized together with a common clock. The clock signal is generated by the CG3250, on its standard clock-out pin, and is used to clock the CS3200 using its standard external clock input. This ensures that they will not get unsynchronized data that could be interpreted as bad results by the analysis software.

The CG3250 and CS3200 have the same multi-pin connector. This connector mates with a 6-foot pleated foil cable that provides optimal transmission of high-speed digital signals. The pin assignments are the same on the CG3250 and CS3200 so that the cable can be used to directly connect the two cards for a “loop-back” test.

The customer must build his own applications because of their application-specific testing and software analysis. Accordingly, we suggested our CompuScope Software Development Kits as well as our CompuGen Digital Software Development Kits.

GaGe Case Recommended Products

Test & Measurement Application Request

We encourage you to contact us and discuss your test & measurement application in more detail with our engineering team. GaGe can provide tailored custom data acquisition hardware and software solutions to meet specific application requirements.