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To keep up with the growing needs of business sectors such as telecommunications, automotive, domotics, medical, aerospace and defense, the performance requirements of RF and HF transistors and amplifiers are increasing sharply. These products need to be affordable, and they must be able to handle more complex information, consume less power and still remain reliable. As a consequence, the design and performance tests of such devices are not a trivial task: It is time consuming, and the number of parameters that need to be tuned and checked are increasing exponentially. Several test and measurement manufacturers are vying for a share of this market. Indeed, there is a growing need for extensive RF and HF characterization capabilities of components operating under realistic conditions. Furthermore, the price must be affordable, even in situations where the S-parameters fail to do their job.

“Quid pro quo?”

Starting from regular DC and S-parameters, this article introduces more advanced applications by gradually extending commercially available vector network analyzers (VNA). The objective of these applications is to fully characterize active components, from small-signal to large-signal behavior under realistic excitations in a single connection. The article answers the questions, “Which nonlinear extensions should I buy first on my limited budget so that I can add more nonlinear capabilities when additional budget becomes available?” and “What do I gain with these extensions?”

From DC and S-parameters to complete large-signal characterization

DC Characterization