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Power Amplifier and Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) Design, Development, Simulation, Testing, Prototyping, and Troubleshooting

Amplifiers are an essential part of any wireless  design. Whether your new product design works in the low analog frequencies,  or in the higher RF and microwave frequencies, it almost certainly needs a power amplifier or low noise amplifier (LNA). But, without the right software and test equipment, you will find it difficult to produce that new RF circuit or microwave circuit  design.

If you can get high quality, non-linear and noise models for your RF design or microwave circuit design, your design task will be fairly easy. But, unfortunately, many manufacturers still do not produce good, usable non-linear and noise models, especially for things like high power MOSFETs and older conventional bipolar high power transistors. If you don't have those models, then you must determine the load pull data for both power amplifiers and low noise amplifiers and then take that data to design your power amplifier or LNA. If you don't have load pull equipment, and most companies do not, then your only alternative is to spend endless hours on the bench blindly tuning your design until you get what you want.

Or, you can call Aerospace Consulting and we can perform load pull testing on your devices and either provide you with that data so that you can proceed with your design, or you can leave that rf design task up to us. We can perform load pull testing up to 12.4 GHz, and we have attenuators that will handle 100 watts to 5 GHz, and 1000 watts to 3 GHz. We can also measure noise figure from 10 MHz to 26.5 GHz. Our network analysis capability extends from 30 kHz through 26.5 GHz.

For accuracy in RF design and RF simulation, we have Modelithics models for inductors, capacitors, resistors, GAASFETs, MOSFETs, pHEMTs, and other semiconductors. Additionally, we have several software programs that will work with many of the Spice model parameters that are published for many devices, including Genesys Cayenne, the Altium Designer simulation software, and IntuSpice. We also know where to get non-linear models produced for virtually any device, although we do not perform that service in-house at the present time.

Aerospace can also help you troubleshoot an amplifier design that you may have that is not working properly. Often, all that is needed is to run some simulations. In "Using Simulation Tools to Debug an Oscillating Amplifier" we show how useful simulation tools can be to fix amplifier problems.