Texas Instruments holds worldwide IC training seminar days called Tech Days. I had the pleasure of attending the Boston, MA Tech Day last week and would describe them as small professional conference and exhibition. As stated on their web site, they are aimed at providing a learning forum for design engineers where practical high-performance solutions, tools and workshops are presented for analog and digital technologies. They have technical sessions all day that cover amplifiers and data converters, audio, digital signal processing, low-power RF, microcontrollers, video and power management.
Between sessions there are break times to attend the exhibition that contains table top booths including various TI product demonstrations, TI supplier booths and distributors. The distributors included Arrow, Avnet, Mouser and Digi-Key. Various suppliers from components to design consultants to PCB design partners are also on hand. It was just like a mini-trade show and well run with a nice setup in the ballroom area.
I attended the seminar on RF Front-end Solution Development Kits for High Speed Designs. It reviewed the basics of digital pre-distortion (DPD) and its improvements to transceiver performance. We went over the important measurements of PAR, ACLR and EVM showing how DPD improves performance. Then we reviewed the steps in implementing a DPD algorithm. Finally, the TI RF development Kit was presented that includes all the hardware and software needed for RF transmit, receive and digital pre-distortion feedback. It can reduce the amount of time needed to design and verify RF systems, such as wireless base stations, remote radio heads, and military radio and intelligence equipment, from months to weeks. It is a flexible kit that allows the user to implement various transmitter functions, change the DPD algorithm and test their system configuration. Various bandwidths and configurations can be ordered.
TI holds these Tech Days all over the world – check here for dates and locations. I found the Tech Day very informative and definitely worthwhile if you are able to attend one of these free Technology Days.