Evaluation Engineering - 18

RF/MICROWAVE TEST

radar signatures from automotive radar sensors with unmatched
speed and efficiency. It's difficult and costly to test and measure
active safety scenario corner cases, such as an autonomous-car
driving scene involving a pedestrian crossing the road. Using
Ansys simulation tools is economical and faster to study regular,
corner, and edge cases. Moreover, simulation also be used to consider cases involving potential loss of life and property damage."
Gentile, MathWorks: "Our customers work across a broad spectrum of applications across all industries. Wireless technology
is ubiquitous and enables connectivity across the board. This
standards-based wireless connectivity including 5G, Bluetooth,
and WLAN. We also enable radar system development for
commercial (for example, consumer, automotive radar) and
aerospace/defense applications."
Moudgal and Himmler, dSPACE: "The current line-up of DARTS
is specifically designed to support the K-band (24 GHz) and
E-band (77 GHz) automotive radar programs. In the future, if
other frequency bands are needed, the DARTS devices are easily
upgradable by switching out the radio front-ends to match the
frequency band of interest."

What do you see as key RF/microwave test challenges?
Chonko, Siglent: "I think that a key area of development is
knowledge, and the gap between new engineers and folks

Ansys RF/microwave simulations.

EVALUATION ENGINEERING JULY 2020

that have been in the industry for a long time. Over the past
10 years, the interest in RF has ballooned, but I'm not sure
that the number of engineers with practical experience has
matched the need. Many experienced engineers are retiring,
and this may leave a significant gap in what we can do today
vs. where we go tomorrow."
Raju, Ansys: "Designing RF/microwave devices and communications systems to be successful requires ensuring precise
signal integrity, accuracy, and fidelity of RF devices, systems,
packages, and antennas. With miniaturization, more ICs, SoCs,
packages, and wireless systems are being integrated into a
single high-speed digital device. This could create interference due to unwanted out-of-band emissions by co-located RF
systems (RF cosite) as well as broadband noise and harmonics
by digital signals (RF desense)."
Stasonis, Pickering Interfaces: "From a switching standpoint,
as frequency increases, the interaction with the user interface
of switching components we incorporate on our switch modules becomes increasingly critical. For example, extreme care is
necessary when cabling is installed on Microwave connectors,
as the signal interfaces are quite small and manufactured to
precise tolerances. In any case, higher power and bandwidth
are always in demand."

Evaluation Engineering

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