Power Sweep Stitching in Modulated RF Experiments With Automatic Ranging

Present-day modulated RF experiments that perform power sweeps use a fixed amplitude range to avoid discontinuities induced by range-switching in the acquisition channels of the measurement instrument. However, working with a fixed amplitude range has its shortcomings as it limits the dynamic range of the swept measurements. That’s why this work proposes to do power sweeps with automatic ranging and tackle the problem of these switching discontinuities. To this end, a noise calibration procedure is developed to get rid of the discontinuities by stitching the figures-of-merit in the power sweep. The developed calibration method is experimentally validated using a power amplifier as a device under test. The calibrated results are compared and discussed with the uncalibrated results to show the impact and the improvement of the proposed calibration.