I feel compelled to let you know of my second "real" Ampsa design project. You may remember that I previously designed a 3-stage LNA near 2 GHz, which we are now producing at least 6000 pieces of.

I just finished a hybrid amp at 1.5 ~ 2.0 GHz. This amp has to provide good gain and power up to 125 C... not easy to do in a small hybrid package. Anyway, the Ampsa design was absolutely perfect... I made one capacitor change (by 0.25pF), and the tuning was perfectly centered. The output power at compression was predicted within 0.5 dB, too. There is no way that we could have done the matching required for this amp in such a short period of time, without a ton of luck... which we never seem to have.

So, I spent about two days doing the design, it took a week and a half to get the parts and fabricate the thin-film substrates, and about 5 minutes to tune it. What I like the most is that I don’t have to spend a week (or more) in the lab tuning on it to make it meet spec (like everyone else here still does). Hopefully between … and I, we can start convincing people to design the right way…

I just got a good raise… and at least some of it was for my performance with Ampsa… I didn’t tell … that it really is FUN once you spend some time with it!!

Thanks again, and I look forward to my next Ampsa project!

Dan Meeks