RF Circuit Design (Nonlinear): Power Amps, Mixers, Oscillators
Courses dedicated to this topic provide participants with an understanding of advanced RF and microwave design techniques. Participants are given an overview of nonlinear devies such as receivers, large signal power amplifiers, oscillators, and mixers. For each of the major topic areas, participants learn the underlying theory of operation, design techniques, operational and performance parameters. Design tradeoffs, linearization, and efficiency enhancement techniques of nonlinear circuits are presented.
This new course incorporates the most popular topics from Applied RF Techniques 1 and 2 in a 5-day format. The material presented provides participants with the critical tools to design, analyze, test, and integrate linear and nonlinear transmitter and receiver circuits and subsystems.
This five-day course is the original nonlinear design course offered by Besser Associates. Compared to the Advanced Microwave Techniques course, this course spends slightly more time on receiver types and power amplifiers.
The surge in demand for high performance and low cost wireless circuits has accelerated the shift to CMOS RFIC technology. As future wireless radios continue to push the available bandwidth and shift to mm-wave range, RF CMOS is expected to remain the predominant technology. This 3-day course will cover in depth the practical aspects of CMOS RF design at both the circuit and device level. The course will begin by an overview of the CMOS transistor and passives from RF perspective, analyzing key concepts in modeling and noise behavior. An overview of various RF circuit blocks highlighting design architectures and circuit implementation tradeoffs will be provided. This will include selected topics in designing low noise amplifiers (LNAs), mixers, voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs) and power amplifiers (PAs). The course will provide insightful guidance in the circuit design process including transistor sizing, layout effects, parasitic reduction techniques and tradeoffs between various circuit topologies. The focus throughout this course will be on providing practical circuit design and implementation techniques utilizing numerous design examples.