Commercial pulsed characterization solutions appear to be mainly targeted for devices, with the likes of Auriga, AMCAD, Keysight, Keithley, ... pulsed IV systems.
Curious to know if people in the MMIC business also apply such systems for characterizing PAs, under pulsed bias (drain) conditions? Or perhaps more custom solutions are being implemented, i.e., gate driver with a switch FET to supply pulse bias (or something else to generate pulses with enough power handling for high PAs?), then measure the pulsed PAE with some current sense circuit, scope, ADC? (Proprietary?
) . How would these handle the influence of the RF (presuming it is also pulsed) as it turns on within the drain pulse? For example, the RF may want to "pull" the drain voltage down, and "push" the drain current up, or vice versa, when the PA is being driven into compression. How would one deal with this for accurate PAE measurements? Does it matter if the pulsed Pdc is being sampled within the "push-pull" window?
Keysight have an app note from a few years back about doing CW PAE measurements on a PNA-X. Does this approach also work for pulsed PAs, with pulse widths of 10-100us? (Looking at you Dr. Joel
). What do the typical setups look like?
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