Measuring the Input Capacitance of the Differential Pins of the NFC's Antenna | Teradyne

NFC devices are quasi pure digital devices, supplied by UVS256-HP resources driven by UP2200 digital channels, where the embedded PPMUs can do most of the analog tests. The need for low Cost of Test pushes to high site count solutions (256 sites or more). One of the challenges is measuring the capacitor inside the antenna inputs. The target site count and COT prevent from using any AC instrument, but the small capacitor value (<100pF) and required accuracy (<1pF) makes this nontrivial. Given the device input structure, a quasi-static method is applicable by using a constant current charge method while the PE’s comparators can evaluate the rising/falling time of the capacitance’s charge. The forementioned technique was implemented on a real device with 68pF typical capacitance: a correlation against old AC method has shown differences within 1pF and production test time below 100ms while the old method test time was about 1s. This paper explains how this technique can be implemented successfully on the UltraFLEXplus and how to avoid the pitfalls that would affect measurement’s accuracy.