How To Achieve Ultrafast Power Supply Transient Response For RF Applications

By Xinyu Liang , Applications Engineering Manager, Analog Devices

Signal processing units and system-on-a-chip (SoC) units usually possess abruptly changing load transient profiles. This load transient will result in a disturbance on the supply voltage that is critical in radio frequency (RF) applications, as the clock frequency will be highly affected by the varying supply voltage. As a result, RFSoCs usually apply blanking time during the load transient.

In 5G applications, information quality is highly related to this blanking period during the transition. Thus, there is an increasing need to minimize the load transient effect on the power supply side to improve the system-level performance for any RFSoC system. This article will introduce several methods used in RF applications to achieve fast transient response in a power supply design.