Due to the escalating costs associated with testing of precision RF components, there is a pressing need for identifying novel test methods that allow RF circuits to be tested with low cost test instrumentation. Specifically, test costs can be lowered significantly if stimulus from a digital pattern generator can be adapted to serve as test stimulus for analog/RF circuits. In this paper, we propose a novel digital pulse based test signal generation technique for testing RF circuits. An optimized pulse stream containing a combination of spectral components within a specified RF frequency band is used as the test stimulus. The optimization is performed using a genetic optimization algorithm and allows gain and nonlinearity specifications to be computed accurately from the observed (down-converted) test response. Simulation data for an RF power amplifier shows excellent correlation of the test results with the test specification values of the device under test (DUT) while allowing all the specifications to be measured from a single data acquisition.
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