Electro-Thermal Passive Intermodulation Distortion in Microwave Attenuators

Wilkerson, Jonathan R.; Gard, K.G.; Steer, M.B.

doi:10.1109/eumc.2006.281242

Cited by 24 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 4 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Thus for a two-tone RF signal with the tones close in frequency, both the envelope and conductivity vary sinusoidally with a small localized variation of temperature, and hence conductivity, at the RF frequency. Variations of resistivity due to thermal modulation are known to produce PIM in microwave terminations, attenuators, integrated circuits, and transmission lines [11], [12], [17]. The PIM generated by an antenna through the electro-thermal process is derived below.…”

Section: A Heat Conduction On a Rectangular Patch Antennamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A periodic heat flux yields a solution that is periodic in time and attenuated as it propagates in space and has the form (11) where is the heat profile of the material. Substituting this solution into (2) yields (12) an equation dependent only on space and periodic in time and has the general solution (13) with roots…”

Section: A Heat Conduction On a Rectangular Patch Antennamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These are voltage-, i.e., electric field-, dependent effects rather than the current density dependence suggested in [10]. With ferromagnetic and junction effects eliminated, the remaining source of PIM is an electrothermal effect [11], [12].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Passive Intermodulation Distortion in Antennas

Wilkerson

Kilgore

Gard

et al. 2015

IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An analytic formulation of passive intermodulation distortion (PIM) in antennas is presented for PIM introduced by electro-thermal modulation of conductivity by current-related losses. A silver rectangular patch antenna was fabricated using a sapphire substrate isolating the thermal process from other possible sources. Two-tone testing at 990 MHz using a sweep of the tone separation from 3 Hz to 100 kHz is reported. Both transmitted and reflected PIM are characterized using a high dynamic range two-tone test system incorporating an analog canceler achieving a dynamic range of 125 dB at 1-Hz tone separation for reflection measurements, and 100 dB at 10-Hz tone separation for transmission measurements with each tone set to 32.3 dBm.

show abstract

Section: A Heat Conduction On a Rectangular Patch Antennamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Heat Conduction On a Rectangular Patch Antennamentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Passive Intermodulation Distortion in Antennas

Wilkerson

Kilgore

Gard

et al. 2015

IEEE Trans. Antennas Propagat.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…It was previously demonstrated that, for single-metal attenuators [17], terminations [13], and transmission lines [14], electrothermal effects were the dominant source of PIM. The devices examined here include multiple conductors and magnetic materials (nickel and stainless steel) and work remains to explain the nonelectro-thermal PIM with dependence on frequency separation in a two-tone test.…”

Section: B Pim In Laboratory Terminationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robust Analog Canceller for High-Dynamic-Range Radio Frequency Measurement

Wetherington

Steer

2012

IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Techn.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

An automated analog canceller is presented that uses feedforward cancellation in a bridge configuration. A minimum of 70 dB of analog cancellation is obtained. The canceller is used to construct an intermodulation distortion measurement system achieving up to 120 dBc of intermodulation dynamic range in twoport transmission testing and 140 dBc of intermodulation dynamic range in one-port reflection testing for frequency separations of at least 1 kHz. At a two-tone frequency separation of 1 Hz, the respective dynamic ranges are at least 94 and 111 dBc. The relationship of cancellation performance and dynamic range is examined in terms of application-specific definitions of dynamic range. The system is then used to measure passive intermodulation distortion using a two-tone test with a tone frequency separation from 1 Hz to 100 MHz.Index Terms-Broadband, cancellation system, dynamic range, nonlinear measurement, passive intermodulation distortion (PIM), reverse power canceller, reverse power cancellers (RPC).

show abstract

“…The nonlinearity from the connection between components including the mechanical effect of contact point, the electron tunneling effect [16,17,18], electrical-thermal coupling effect [19,20], the dirt on the surface of the part and so on. We only focus on some of them in this paper.…”

Section: Analysis Of the Physics Mechanism Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%