EMC susceptibility study of low-dropout voltage regulator using a test chip

In this paper, a test chip is introduced to study the susceptibility of low dropout voltage regulator (LDO) by direct RF power injection (DPI) method. The structure and failure mechanism of LDO module is analyzed. Both of hardware and software DPI set-up are given to characterize the test flow. A novel test method of on-chip sensor sampling is described by the functional frame and sampling arithmetic. Power distribution network (PDN) model is extracted which has a good match to S parameter test. The DPI test results by on-chip sensor are used to compare the traditional external DPI test methods especially to reveal the real immunity level in high frequency domain. The susceptibility level is analyzed which will be used for modeling work.

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