TEST & MEASUREMENT APPLICATION NOTES AND WHITE PAPERS

  • Testing For Coexistence In Crowded And Contested RF Environments

    In this paper, we review some of the key research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) challenges that arise when developing and deploying systems that need to operate in congested and/or contested RF environments.

  • Directivity And VSWR Measurements: Understanding Return Loss Measurements

    The characterization of microwave networks requires discriminating between forward and backward traveling waves. Unfortunately no directional device is perfect, leading to potentially dramatic measurement errors. In this note we show that return loss and VSWR measurements are greatly complicated by the finite performance of the directional device used to measure the reflected power.

  • Circuit Models For Plastic Packaged Microwave Diodes

    This paper reports on the measurement and establishment of circuit models for SOT-23 and SOD-323 packaged diodes. Results indicate that the 1.5 nH estimate for the SOT-23 is a useful result, as is 1.2 nH for SOD-323 single packaged diodes. It was also determined that the effective inductance of the SOT-23 may be reduced to approximately 0.4 nH by adding a second bond wire and modifying the microstrip line. Other lead configurations, including parallel bond wires and common cathode configurations, were also studied.

  • What Is Pulse Shaping?

    In this industry briefing,George Bollendorf explains a new approach to fix fidelity issues caused by the transmitting amplifier that matches input pulse signal shape, minimizes droop, overshoot, ringing, and rise and fall times.

  • Verifying The Clock Source

    In order to select or develop a clock generator to use in your design or to ensure that the supplied system clock has the proper performance, you'll need to consider phase noise, jitter, wideband noise and spurs as performance indicators.

TEST & MEASUREMENT SOLUTIONS

Electrostatic discharge testing is utilized worldwide by electronics manufacturers to determine the ESD susceptibility of their devices. It is extremely difficult to estimate the exact cost of ESD loss annually, but it can safely be stated that ESD requires the development and testing of many hardware prototypes and contributes to a high number of warranty claims and loss of consumer confidence if failure occurs in the hands of the customer. Given the high cost in time and materials associated with ESD hardware testing, the ability to simulate the ESD testing process in XFdtd is extremely valuable, allowing engineers to pinpoint locations susceptible to ESD damage and optimize ESD mitigation during the concept and design stage of product development.

Model HP 4268A is a capacitance meter designed for testing high value multilayer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) designs

The Si894x is a galvanically isolated delta-sigma modulator which outputs a digital signal proportional to the voltage level at the input. 

The dB-9003 and dB-9005 from dB Control are custom-mounted Integrated Stabilized RF Sources (ISRFS) designed to operate in the I and Ka-band frequency range. Both products feature high accuracy and a wide temperature operating range. They can be controlled and set up with a digital port. The units are packaged in a custom configuration with conduction cooling.

Radar simulation systems (i.e., RF sources and/or receivers) must perform to an exacting minimum standard if they are to accurately prove the field worthiness of EW systems.

Bird offers the FH-AV-KIT, a FlightHawk™ RF Aviation Test Kit designed for avionics testing and measurement applications. This kit includes a proven antenna and cable testing functionality of the FlightHawk handheld analyzer, all necessary adapters and cabling, and Bird’s aviation testing software that allows anyone on the maintenance team to test and verify all antenna systems in a fleet.

Holzworth Instrumentation was founded as a phase noise measurement company. Along the path to phase noise analysis solutions, our high performance building blocks were developed and sold in the form of RF Synthesizers, Phase Detectors, etc. The HA7401A is a Fixed Frequency Phase Noise Analyzer, and the HA7402A is a Phase Noise Measurement Engine.

Pentek offers the Quartz® Model 6003 high-performance Quartz eXpress Module (QuartzXM) based on the Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC FPGA. The RFSoC FPGA integrates eight RF-class A/D and D/A converters into the Zynq’s multiprocessor architecture, creating a multichannel data conversion and processing solution on a single chip.