Simplifying Design with High Frequency Wideband Components

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Electronic Test and Measurement (T&M)

The test and measurement (T&M) instrumentation market has always needed wideband performance. Most applications in this market, such as spectrum analyzer, signal generator and vector signal analyzer cover wide frequency spectrum and require extremely good signal integrity. A single instrument needs to be able covers a wide spectrum of frequency bands (wideband requirement) and need ability to detect very low fidelity signals (low noise figure and high linearity). As a result, wideband performance is key.

Traditionally, semiconductor companies had to tradeoff wideband performance for RF specs or the other way around. As a result, T&M designers used a lot of narrowband parts in parallel to cover wide frequency range. But such solutions were extremely complex, expensive and difficult to maintain. Analog Devices has now simplified the designs. Using wideband mixer parts T&M customers can get equivalent or better performance than narrowband parts, while also cover multiple frequency bands with just one part. Analog Devices features industry’s broadest portfolio of passive wideband mixers.

As shown in the generic signal analyzer block diagram below, ADI’s wideband parts reduce the total number of parts needed, while ensuring improved performance and versatility of the hardware architecture for future designs.