Effects of Measurement Precision on Wafer-Based DUT Noise Parameter Characterization

This talk investigates the effects of noise measurement inaccuracies on the extracted noise parameters when characterizing modern low noise transistors. The considered noise measurement system uses passive tuners and a VNA-based noise receiver. We show the effects of measurement inaccuracy on the final extracted DUT noise parameters and particularly that similar measurement inaccuracies can affect different types of DUTs differently. Each of the extracted noise parameters (NFmin, Rn, Gopt) can deviate to a lesser or greater extent based on the DUT properties which can be broken down by various performance characteristics (Gain, NFmin, Rn, and Gopt).