High-Frequency Low-Distortion One-Tone and Two-Tone Signal Generation Using Arbitrary Waveform Generator

This paper describes analysis, simulation and experiment verification of high-frequency one-tone and two-tone low-distortion signal generation methods with an arbitrary waveform generator (AWG) for analog/mixed-signal IC testing. Our previously proposed phase switching method was limited to low-frequency signal generation, and it cannot be used directly for high-frequency signal generation. We propose here a method for generating a low-distortion high-frequency signal (i.e., the frequency close to the Nyquist frequency of the AWG) with an AWG, and show its theoretical analysis and simulation results. With this proposed method, 3rd order harmonics of the generated signal are suppressed simply by changing the AWG program (or waveform memory contents)—AWG nonlinearity identification is not required—and spurious components, generated far from the signal band, are relatively easy to remove using an analog filter.