Have recent events confined you to working out of a home office (or better yet, a deck with a view), but you still face upcoming design reviews and proposal submissions even though you don’t have access to a lab? Or perhaps you find you have a little free time now that you’re not booked solid with meetings. Or maybe remote working has been your thing all along. Marki Microwave understands and are here to help! We’ve collected several resources here to help you including downloadable component models, new podcasts, technical videos and an emerging series of webinars. As always, you can contact our engineering team with technical questions at [email protected].
Get this podcast on your phone!
Season 1, Episode 1: In this episode Chris and Doug discuss Marki’s transition from being a hand-built hybrid mixer manufacturer to a cutting edge monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) company. Part 1 of 2
Season 1, Episode 2: In this episode Chris and Doug discuss Marki’s transition from being a hand-built hybrid mixer manufacturer to a cutting edge monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) company. Part 2 of 2
Season 1, Episode 3: In this episode Chris, Doug, and Jim discuss entrepreneurship, the trials and tribulations of being a small business, and the future peril of the manufacturing industry in the United States for RF products. (feat. Jim Morgan, CEO & Founder of SemiGen)
Season 1, Episode 4: In this episode Chris gives advice to young engineers coming out of school. Chris tells stories about what he has learned from his mentors that he thinks every engineer could use. (guest speaker, Stanford)
Season 1, Episode 5: In this episode Chris talks about MMIC mixer technology and how it’s changed over the years. This is an introduction to RF/Microwave technology for those who are interested, but do not have technical knowledge. If you’d like us to speak about Marki Microwave’s technology at a future event, please contact us at [email protected] (guest speaker, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo)
Differential signals and circuits have a magical property: the ability to cancel undesired signals without filtering.
In this short (25 minute) webinar we will present:
• The Three Mistakes Everyone Makes When Using Differential Circuits
• How Balanced Circuits Can Give You Better Noise Suppression, Spur Cancellation, and More Power
• The Best Balun to use for Every Situation
Season 2 Coming Soon!
Webinar: IQ, Image Reject, and Single Sideband Mixers Demystified
May 28, 2020 | 8am PST
Quadrature mixers (IQ, Image Reject, and Single Sideband) are offer powerful capabilities and are critical to modern communication and electronic warfare systems. However, they are also among the most complex RF and Microwave circuits. In this webinar, Marki Microwave will deconstruct these powerful circuits by explaining:
• How ‘quadrature’ signals lead to signal cancellation without filtering
• Common compensation techniques for optimal carrier and sideband suppression
• The best and worst ways to create quadrature signals for any application
Webinar: Amplifiers for Synthesizer and Local Oscillator Generation: The Unsung Application
May 14, 2020 | 8am PST
Many amplifiers in a typical RF/microwave system are used for single frequency applications: for local oscillator and clock generation. However, amplifiers are typically designed and characterized only for signal applications. In this short (25 minute) webinar, we will discuss:
• Do gain flatness, IP3, and noise figure really matter for LO drivers?
• Phase noise: the impact of amplifier selection
• Save time with more usable amps: positive gain slope, positive only bias, and SWAP optimized drivers
Webinar: A Brief Guide to Mixer Spurs
April 30, 2020 | 8am PST
Spurious products can quickly overcrowd your output spectrum and destroy the dynamic range of your system if you aren’t careful. The threat of these spurs can be minimized if a designer can predict their exact frequency and power early in the design phase. In this short (25 minute) webinar, we will discuss:
• Where single tone intermodulation products come from within a mixer
• How to model a mixer to get close approximations of spurious levels
• How to get the most accurate prediction possible without sitting in front of a VNA
Webinar: Microwave Amplifier Biasing Made Easy
April 16, 2020 | 10am PST
Optimal amplifier biasing can make a direct impact on the performance of your system. However, choosing the correct bias levels for your application can be challenging, and there are a number of factors that are often overlooked. In this short (25 minutes) webinar, we will provide insight into:
• Important distinctions between amplifier topologies
• Biasing considerations to improve noise filtering, reliability, and electrical performance
• Heat: why it’s a stronger factor than you might think
Webinar: Baluns, Balance & Differential Signals
April 2, 2020 | 10am PST
Differential signals and circuits have a magical property: the ability to cancel undesired signals without filtering. In this short (25 minute) webinar we will present:
• The Three Mistakes Everyone Makes When Using Differential Circuits
• How Balanced Circuits Can Give You Better Noise Suppression, Spur Cancellation, and More Power
• The Best Balun to use for Every Situation
Download both the ADS and MWO kits below.
Marki Microwave is proud to publicly offer our non-linear simulation design kits for both NI AWR’s Microwave Office (MWO) and Keysight’s Advanced Design System (ADS). At Marki Microwave we strive to offer top tier engineering support with experts in all aspects of the RF & Microwave field. The best-in-class RF & Microwave components demand engineering support that is up to par. In keeping with this philosophy, both MWO and AWR design kits offer simulation models for our Microlithic and MMIC mixer and multiplier products. Support for both design kits is ongoing and verified through measurement. If you do not see the part you are interested in simulating, try looking for it as a bare die with the ‘-CH’ suffix. We do not offer models including packaging effects so bare die performance will be closest to performance of the packaged mixer.
You won’t find mixer S-parameters on our website. For non-linear devices S-parameters are not meaningful. S-parameters only shows small-signal behavior and don’t allow for large-signal analysis. X-parameters, the superset of S-parameters, do allow for large-signal analysis; however, X-parameter models are both environmentally dependent and depend on the device under test’s input condition. Both of these behavioral models do a good job for passive linear components like power dividers and couplers, and you’ll find downloadable S-parameters on our website for all of our passive components.
Heavily non-linear devices such as mixers, doublers, and NLTLs demand physics-based models capable of accurately simulating non-linear effects of the diodes within the circuits. This is precisely what our design kits do. Numerical solutions through harmonic balance simulations are the time efficient way of performing non-linear analysis such as IP3 and spurious output prediction early in the design cycle. Days and weeks of careful characterization can be reduced to a few hours with the design and debug support offered by our simulation design kits. For an overview of the design kits, examples of its accuracy, and a complete list of products supported please see our Brief Guide to Marki Mixer Simulation Models.
