Assessment of Integrated Circuits Emissions with an Equivalent Dipole-Moment Method

An appropriate integrated circuit (IC) evaluation early in the design stage is essential to ensure timely development of mobile devices with a satisfactory total isotropic sensitivity (TIS), a figure of merit to measure radio-frequency receiver sensitivity. An IC evaluation method based on equivalent dipole-moment source using the transverse electromagnetic mode (TEM) cell is proposed and experimentally investigated in terms of correlation of measured TIS with two existing IC emission measurement methods: the TEM cell method (IEC 61967-2) and the near-field scan method (IEC 61967-3). In addition, a cost-effective and reliable test scheme is introduced so the three approaches can share a single common test board to avoid potential hardware-to-hardware deviation. Measurement results on three software-controlled operation states are compared with respective TIS measured in an anechoic chamber. The best correlation was obtained in the proposed equivalent dipole-moment-based evaluation method and the limitations of the two previous methods are discussed