A Black-Box Measurement-Based Modeling Method for the RF Emission and Immunity Behavior of ICs

A method is proposed that allows to construct behavioral models of the radio frequency (RF) emission and immunity performance of an integrated circuit (IC) without requiring any knowledge of its internal architecture or activity. It is based on three types of measurements: (1) multi-port scattering parameter (S-parameter) measurements using a vector network analyzer, (2) conducted emission measurements using an electromagnetic interference (EMI) receiver, and (3) conducted immunity measurements using a Direct Power Injection (DPI) test set-up. For these measurements, the IC-to-be-modeled is mounted on a simple test board that only contains 50-Omega microstrip lines running to each pin that needs to be included in the model. No other connections to the IC are provided on this board as all connections are made externally by means of properly selected commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) bias tees. In this way, it is made sure that the models only cover the intrinsic performance of the IC itself and that their validity is not limited to a particular application board or circuit environment. In this paper, the method is applied to a standard position sensor IC in the frequency range of 300 kHz to 2.5 GHz. However, the method should work well from nearly DC to about 3 GHz for ICs with (1) package dimensions of less than 10 mm x 10 mm x 2.5 mm, and (2) less than 12 pins to be included in the model.