Using waveform engineering to understand the impact of harmonic terminations during 5:1 VSWR stress tests

Abstract

There are many applications where the operational environment of the antenna is challenging, which means its impedance can be highly variable, so the RF PA needs to be able to operate over a wide variety of loads without stress or failure. Assessing this is a key requirement of reliability testing, with VSWR sweeps being a typical way to test this durability. It is important to make sure the amount of information gained from these sweeps is maximized, so adding RF I-V waveform information can help give a more accurate view of what is occurring at the current generator plane. Also if the fundamental and second harmonic loads are systematically swept significant voltage stress, possibly not seen during the current conventional VSWR tests, is observed, which has implications in both the output matching network design and the current method of testing.