A highly flexible evaluation system for telecommunication analog front-ends

As technological progress leads to increasing data transmission rates, use of digital transmission is inevitable. However, since analog waveforms are involved in digital transmission, analog front-ends of high quality are necessary. This paper introduces a highly flexible test system for analog front-end IC's that operate at various power supply voltages. Converters at a data rate of at least 10 Msamples/s can be evaluated. The test system is appropriate for both analog and digital IC stimulus and for both analog and digital IC response analysis. Each competent of an analog front-end can be evaluated independdently. The evaluation system offers the possibility of testing groups of components like total paths.The test system is able to configure programmable analog front-end IC's.