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Innovations in EDA Webcast
Date: April 5, 2012
Time: 10 AM PT/ 1 PM ET/ 5 PM UTC
Title: RF Power Amplifier Design Series - Part 3:Fast Characterization of Power Amplifier Performance with Modulated Signals
Abstract: Characterizing amplifier performance using sinusoids is reasonable during the early stages of the design process. However, gain compression from a one-tone sweep, or intermodulation distortion from a two-tone sweep, may not accurately predict ACLR or EVM, the real specifications. Designers need to know ACLR and EVM while an amplifier is delivering a specified output power, and they need to know how much statistical variation to expect. Also, they want to know what design parameters could be adjusted to improve performance. This webcast shows techniques for carrying out these types of simulations. ADS examples will be provided.
Target Audience: Power Amplifier Designers
Speaker: Andy Howard, Senior Applications Expert
Andy Howard joined HP in 1985 as a development engineer designing microwave circuits. He spent a year in Japan as a systems engineer before becoming an HP EEsof applications engineer in 1993. His applications work has included simulating noise in nonlinear circuits, high-yield design techniques (design of experiments), Circuit Envelope applications, and for the past fourteen years Agilent ADS, RFDE, and GoldenGate examples. He developed the ADS Amplifier DesignGuide, and also worked on the Mixer DesignGuide. He has extensively updated the ADS Load Pull DesignGuide. He designed a high-speed prescaler IC using Agilent’s RFIC Dynamic Link, which was fabricated using IBM’s SiGe process. He is the author of the RFIC Flow Workshop. He graduated from U.C. Berkeley, B.S. E.E., 1983, and M.S. E.E., 1985. He was a visiting researcher for one year at NEC's Central Research Labs in Japan while a graduate student, and is fluent in Japanese. He has published more than 20 magazine articles, HP or Agilent seminar papers, and application notes.
