Tektronix and Mesuro: A Cultivation of Ideas through to Products and the birth of a company at MTT-S IMS
Darren McCarthy, Worldwide RF Technical Marketing Manager, Tektronix, offers impressions and experience with the MTT-S IMS show.
At Tektronix, we believe the MTT-S IMS show reflects a representative collection of our RF/uWave customer base. You have research and academia mixing with industries and applications across the entire spectrum of test. We see commercial and defense industries well represented. While MTT-S IMS is a North American tradeshow, it does provide a good perspective on international test challenges due to the breadth of attendees that travel to the show.
Over the years, you can expect to see the cultivation of ideas put into papers and validated concepts into products. You always expect to see traditional companies providing traditional solutions for test, but MTT-S IMS also gives us an opportunity to develop and cultivate new concepts in test for traditional markets.
From a test equipment manufacturer’s perspective, you often see academia and test equipment vendors working together to incubate ideas on innovative test solutions.
One representative example of the incubation of ideas through to products can be seen in our work with Cardiff University academia on the challenges and applications of waveform measurements for Active Harmonic Load-Pull systems.
One of the themes that became predominant in multiple keynotes this year was the concept of the “Greening of Wireless”. So how can test equipment help? It all starts with improving the efficiency at the device by going non-linear.
Cardiff has long been an academic leader in non-linear measurement techniques. With over 10 years of development experience with load-pull measurement systems and RF device characterizations, Cardiff academia had amassed a catalog of papers and presentations on innovative waveform measurement techniques for the optimization of power efficient devices.
At the 2008 show, Tektronix and Cardiff provided a live demonstration of an innovative test solution for active harmonic load-pull. With awareness primarily driven by the 7 papers and posters presented during the week, the opportunity to see concepts put into practice with a live demonstration on test equipment was a big hit.
A first impression of attendees to the booth was: “But where’s the rack of equipment and tuners needed to do this”.
The simplified active harmonic load-pull system consisted almost entirely of commercially available instruments and components. But these instruments and components did include the expected Network Analyzers and Tuners!
The primary Tektronix products were the Arbitrary Waveform Generator (AWG) and Sampling Scope (DSA8200). The key was the system integration and measure science provided by the Cardiff software to control the instruments and extract the waveform measurements.
The live demonstration was performed using the actual device that was at the center of some of the research papers. What had been a 10W device around ~64% operating efficiency when optimized through traditional test methods was now demonstrated to be 12W device at 81% operating efficiency with the Cardiff device characterization and waveform engineering.