Industry News

DMU Awarded Satellite Navigation Research

A pioneering navigation device which can tune into different satellite networks around the world is being developed by researchers at De Montfort University (DMU) Leicester, UK, in partnership with Nottingham Scientific Ltd. (NSL). NSL specializes in the commercial exploitation of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) technology. Satellite navigation receivers...
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An Improved BSIM4 Model for 0.13 μm RF CMOS Using a Simple Lossy Substrate Extraction Method

An improved BSIM4 large-signal model for a 0.13 μm RF CMOS transistor with lossy substrate description is presented in this article. To accurately accomplish the CMOS model for microwave circuit designs, the RLC networks representing the parasitic...
In order to improve the simulation accuracy of microwave circuit designs, an accurate active device model plays an important role for circuit simulations. According to previous studies, the BSIM models can precisely predict the characteristics of deep sub-micron MOSFETs at operation frequencies below 1 GHz for digital and analog...
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Software-defined Radio Transmitters for Advanced Wireless and Satellite Communications Systems

This article reviews and discusses the critical issues in designing software-defined radio (SDR)-based transmitters for wireless and satellite applications. Digital predistortion-based linearization techniques as an enabling technology for SDR transmit...
The wireless and satellite communications communities have always been looking for power efficient radios. However, the power efficiency is greatly dominated by the efficiency of the RF power amplifier (PA) in the transmitting path. Recently, most of the communication systems being deployed or to be deployed in the near...
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Analysis and Design of a Compact Multi-band Antenna for Wireless Communications Applications

A compact multi-band and single-feed microstrip antenna is proposed for wireless communications applications at 0.9, 1.8, 1.9 and 2.4 GHz. The antenna in this article consists of a microstrip feedline, a two-step power coupler, a rectangular loop and a...
Personal wireless communications have recently gained wide popularity. Presently, the trend is to provide a wireless link to every kind of electronic device. In particular, there is a specific need for greater capacities and transmission speeds, which, together with a growing demand from users for more complicated services, require...
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Harmonic Load Pull with High Gamma Tuners

Automated load pull has become a standard tool for characterizing microwave power devices. Power devices operate in a nonlinear mode in order to achieve reasonable efficiency, so testing must be done with actual drive power and impedance matching. This...
Microwave power devices, widely used in modern wireless and communications systems, must operate in a nonlinear mode in order to operate efficiently. Nonlinear operation means that the only valid way to test them is under actual operating conditions of DC bias, RF power and impedance. Small-signal S-parameters are not...
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A Harmonic and Size Reduced Ring Hybrid Using Hairpin-type LUCs

New hairpin-type low pass unit cells (LUC) are applied to the design of a microstrip hybrid ring for size reduction and harmonic suppression. This LUC is superior to the previously reported LUC in the simplicity of its structure and its ability to supp...
The hybrid ring has been widely used in microwave systems, due to its simplicity and performance. Because of the long electrical length of the ring itself, size reduction is becoming a major design consideration for many practical applications. Furthermore, when designing a microwave system, how to effectively handle the...
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Calculating Mismatch Uncertainty

Mismatch uncertainty is a very common and often underestimated source of error in microwave power measurements. It arises from an incomplete knowledge of the phase of the reflection coefficients of the source and load impedances, plus their interconnection, and is usually a large component of the overall measurement uncertainty...
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