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Troubleshooting RF Circuit, Microwave Circuit Design, and Digital Circuits and Systems

One of the realities of new product development involving RF design and microwave circuit design and technologies is that the performance you get is often not the performance that you expected. There can be many reasons for this, but Aerospace Consulting has seen, and resolved, most of them over the last 3 decades.

 

By calling Aerospace Consulting to review your design, you can often be saved huge amounts of time to market and cost. Since we have seen the many problems that can occur when someone tries to develop a new RF or microwave circuit or system, we can often quickly identify and resolve the problems. Some of the most common problems that we see are related to relatively easy-to-fix problems like:

 

RF layout -- if your RF circuit layout is not done correctly, your RF circuit will not work, even though you duplicated the schematic perfectly. You would be shocked to see how many times we see this problem. RF layout issues can also cause your RF circuit to fail FCC testing.

 

LC filter designs that don't work as expected -- usually because        inaccurate simulation models were used for the inductors and capacitors.

 

Amplifiers that oscillate, or are close to oscillation (see our article on using simulation tools to cure an amplifier that oscillated due to poor RF layout).

 

Transmitter design that has excessive spurious signals (see our article on using simulation tools to reduce spurious signals).

 

Receiver design that has excessive spurious signals.

 

Upconverter with excessive spurious signals.

 

Downconverter with excessive spurious signals.

 

Receiver circuit that does not have adequate sensitivity, or sensitivity issues that seem to come and go.

 

Microwave filter design that does not filter adequately or has improper pass-band characteristics or out-of-band rejection. This is often caused by failure to perform a final check, and optimization on the design, if necessary, using EM (ElectroMagnetic) simulation tools, which we have.

 

 

 Aerospace Consulting can use RF simulation tools, as well as a fully equipped laboratory, to troubleshoot and assist you with your prototype design, new product development, or invention design.

 

Aerospace Consulting also has the necessary tools to troubleshoot digital circuits. For simulating problems, we can use Altium Designer simulation tools, which include SPICE and FPGA simulation tools, as well as test equipment such as a logic analyzer, various oscilloscopes, and signal generators such as arbitrary waveform generators.