mmWave signal source

2023 · Test infrastructure · RF · FPGA

Characterizing millimeter-wave chips like the chiplet beamformer requires a signal source that covers 22–40 GHz and supports advanced modulation, and the commercial instruments that can do it are painfully expensive. So we built our own. A non-standard architecture brought the cost down by a large factor while still meeting the signal quality our measurements need, which made this class of testing practical for the whole lab instead of a scheduling bottleneck around one shared instrument.