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The automated test and measurement (ATE) landscape is rapidly changing, progressing beyond the capabilities of traditional bench-top and most legacy ATE systems. Varying and diverse performance requirements, testing speeds and frequencies used by modern cellular architectures (5G), Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, and the latest feature dense systems-on-chip/systems-inpackage (SoC/SiP) necessitate a different approach.

One regularly cited inhibitor to even faster adoption is the need for a public charging infrastructure that is universally available. The technical teams behind these infrastructures are working diligently to both increase the number of currently available plug-in stations as well as drive technological innovation and drive down costs to deliver wireless charging infrastructures available in both public and private spaces. This article examines several of the technical challenges that must be solved to bring this to fruition. First, let’s review the current state of WPT in general, and in automotive applications specifically.

For many high power RF applications, the “Q factor” of embedded capacitors is one of the most important characteristics in the design of circuits.  This includes products such as cellular/telecomm equipment, MRI coils, plasma generators, lasers and other medical, military and industrial electronics. This article explains the importance of Q and how to select capacitors with high Q.

SDRs are now a production reality for multiple applications across a range of markets. Availability of integrated transceivers, wideband RF data converters, and flexible RF MMICs give RF and system engineers a range of tradeoffs to implement configurable, digitally controlled radio hardware.

It is a known fact that time interleaving of Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADC) is used to increase sampling rate of modern high-performance digitizers. A recent high performance example is the 10-bit digitizers from Guzik Technical Enterprises (GTE) that feature Keysight Technologies ADC Integrated Circuit (IC) where 160 individual ADC are interleaved to achieve sampling at up to 64 Gsa/s (160 “slices” sampling at 400 Msa/s) forming two analog channels at 32 Gsa/s each.

Depending on system requirements, there are multiple ways of dealing with these problematic signals. Careful frequency planning and filtering can help to drastically reduce the number of spurs, but they’re always going to be there. Therefore, it’s important for a systems designer to accurately measure the spurious levels at the output of a mixer in order to determine how best to handle them.

With the Internet of Things (IoT) and the emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a surge of innovation is occurring across the industry that connects an ecosystem of sensors, devices and equipment to a network that promises to improve asset utilization, enhance process efficiency and boost productivity. Read this primer on RF properties applied to IoT.