Research And Implementation Of Universal Automatic Test Platform For Data Converter Based On FPGA

As a link between the analog world and the digital world, the performance of the data converter determines the performance of the whole electronic information processing system.With the emergence of the new technology of time domain interleaving, continuous time ∑-Δ modulation, digital calibration, data converter towards higher speed, higher accuracy, more channels and lower power consumption development.Increasingly wide range of applications and more and more high accuracy and working speed, the test of the data converter has raised a great challenge, mainly in the test accuracy, efficiency and cost.In the manufacturing process of large-scale semiconductor manufacturing, the automatic test equipment is usually used to carry out the test of the chip. But these equipments are being monopolized by foreign countries, and some are still limited by exports. In addition, because of its complex structure and high accuracy, its price is very high. Those small and medium enterprises and research institutions are clearly not affordable. Therefore, it is very important,as well as a good market prospect, to develop the test equipment which is small, low cost and meet the testing accuracy.At present, the main test method for data converter is FFT method, sine wave fitting method and histogram method, The testing process involves a lot of digital processing and transmission.FPGA as a new type of high performance programmable logic device developed in recent years, has a high degree of integration, the internal has rich resources. Many high-end FPGA products are integrated with DSP or CPU computing module.with general logic resources, it can realize the function of microprocessor. This makes FPGA not only can complete the complicated time sequence and combination logic circuit function, but also have the ability to develop the software and hardware. This undoubtedly provides the user with a great design space.Its design is flexible, the design cycle is short, the development cost is low, the product is easy to upgrade, and the number of programming is not limited,all these make it to be a very good choice for this kind of test equipment with low cost and low cost.LabVIEW as a graphical programming language, it uses icons instead of text to create an program, which is a virtual instrument. Virtual instrument has no actual control panel, but it can realize the operation of the virtual instrument by a graphical soft panel,which is built by visual graphics programming language, with computer software platform and powerful graphics environment. Button, indicator light, display window, knob and other control parts of the soft panel have the same function as the actual instrument. The user use the mouse and keyboard and other soft panel, to achieve the corresponding functions of the instrument. All of these advantages above make LabVIEW a good choice for the design of the control software.In this paper, a general test platform for data converter based on FPGA is designed.After build the test circuit, the static performance parameters and dynamic performance parameters of DAC and ADC can be tested by control software LabVIEW automatically. Design work mainly includes the design of the program of development board and the program of LabVIEW. The development board—HFC Rev1.1, used in test bench, is the independent design of the laboratory.It is equipped with the chip in Altera Stratix Ⅲ series—EP3SL150F1152I3. FPGA program can be divided into two parts, that is, the ADC test part and the DAC test part. The LabVIEW control program of the test platform is mainly divided into three parts: the data receiving and transmitting control part, the DAC test control part and the ADC test control part.A complete test circuit was built using the instruments and equipments in the laboratory. Two chips— XMD₁616（16 pipeline ADC） and XMD₁615（16 bit current steering structure DAC） were tested to verify the performance of the test platform. Finally, this paper also analyzes the related points of attention and errors of the whole testing platform.