Wide Band Power amplifiers / Mixers projects
Point to Point Microwave link
Microwave links are widely used for point-to-point communications because their small wavelength allows conveniently-sized antennas to direct them in narrow beams, which can be pointed directly at the receiving antenna. This allows nearby microwave equipment to use the same frequencies without interfering with each other, as lower frequency radio waves do. Another advantage is that the high frequency of microwaves gives the microwave band a very large information-carrying capacity; the microwave band has a bandwidth 30 times that of all the rest of the radio spectrum below it. Point to Point microwave links are used for audio and video transmission. It could be used for internet data connectivity and mobile network backhaul.
An integral hardware equipment to the microwave link is the block up-converter (BUC) which has the role of properly modifying and amplifying baseband signals to be transmitted at microwave frequency bands such as C, X and Ku bands. A BUC block consists of several circuits performing various tasks. One of these circuits is the mixer which performs frequency translation from low frequencies to microwave frequencies. High linearity properties for the mixer circuit is an important concern. Recent research has shown that implementation of mixer circuits with high linearity is of great demands. In this order, our company has focused on designing Power Amplifiers and mixer circuits for X-band Point to Point radio applications.
VSAT Communication
Very Small Aperture Terminal (VSAT) is a two-way satellite ground station communication system. It provides internet connection at remote locations. This could be sparsely spaced villages in a vast countryside or distant mining camps or oil exploitation sites. Conventionally, frequency bands of C, X, Ku and Ka are used in commercial VSAT links. Transmitter output power levels in VSAT systems typically range from 2 Watts to 16 Watts. The new technologies has opened a new era of high-power compact-size integrated amplifiers. At our company, circuit designers are engaged with the design of novel X-band integrated power amplifiers with the capability of generating output powers up to 12 Watts.
X-band Weather Radar
Modern weather radars emerged around 1980s, operating upon the basics of Doppler Effect for detection of wind speed. These radars used Magnetron or Klystron devices for a centralized signal generation source and scanned the sky with a single-beam mechanically-steered Parabolic antenna. Further on, dual polarization technique was introduced which allowed discrimination between different hydrological phenomena such as rain, snow and hail. The proliferation of solid-state devices assisted a major improvement in weather radar performance which was exploitation of phased array antennas to electronically-steer the antenna beam. This resulted in agile sky observation which significantly increased early-warning time duration of severe weather conditions. In the last decade, various S-band and C-band phased array weather radars have been deployed successfully around the globe. Nowadays, X-band phased array radars are under development to be amended to the existing radar chain to fill-up coverage gaps. Our company has targeted to design 6 / 12 Watts X-band integrated power amplifiers for use in X-band weather radars.
