This work presents a technique for the generation of analog sinusoidal signals with high spectral quality and reduced circuitry resources. Two integrated demonstrators are presented to show the feasibility of the approach. The proposed generation technique is based on a modified analog filter that provides a sinusoidal output as the response to a DC input. It has the attributes of digital programming and control, low area overhead, and low design effort, which make this approach very suitable as test stimulus generator for built-in test applications. The demonstrators—a continuous-time generator and a discrete-time one—have been integrated in a standard 0.35 μm CMOS technology. Simulation results and experimental measurements in the lab are provided, and the obtained performance is compared to current state-of-the-art on-chip generation strategies.

This work has been funded in part by the Spanish Government and FEDER funds through projects TEST (TEC2007-68072/MIC), SR2 (TSI-020400-2008-71/MEDEA+2A105), TOETS (CATRENE CT302), and by the Junta de Andalucia through project ACATEX (P09-TIC-5386).

El pdf del artículo es la versión post-print.

Peer reviewed