Built-In EVM measurement with negligible hardware overhead

Haralampos Stratigopoulos from TIMA Laboratory presents his views on an all-digital, built-in method for measuring EVM that eliminates the need for advanced external test equipment and speeds up test application time. The method is based on the intuition is that the receiver and the transmitter of a transceiver system are designed to perform complementary operations in the baseband and all the complex steps of the receive operation are implemented for this particular platform. Haralampos Stratigopoulos proposes an innovative method for measuring EVM on-chip with very little DFT overhead. The DFT approach presents less than 0.13% overhead for the transceiver excluding any DSP or controller area. A detailed analysis of the overhead imposed by the proposed DFT scheme is presented and it is shown that EVM can be measured with less than 0.2% error.