RF Design Services

We design with regulatory compliance in mind from the start, including proper filtering, spurious emission control, and antenna design. Pre-compliance testing is performed in-house before formal FCC, CE, IC, and other certifications. We maintain a 99%+ first-pass certification success rate.

Yes, we design custom antennas including PCB trace antennas, chip antennas, ceramic antennas, and external antenna systems. Antenna designs are optimized for your specific enclosure, frequency bands, and radiation pattern requirements using electromagnetic simulation tools.

Our RF lab includes vector network analyzers, spectrum analyzers, signal generators, power meters, and antenna measurement systems. We can characterize S-parameters, measure antenna patterns, and perform EMC pre-compliance testing to ensure designs meet specifications.

An RF front-end module integrates the low-noise amplifier, power amplifier, filters, switches, and matching networks between the antenna and the transceiver IC, with the primary design challenge being minimizing insertion loss while maintaining sufficient out-of-band rejection and linearity. Component selection must balance noise figure, gain, IP3 linearity, and power consumption within the system link budget.

Antenna matching network optimization uses vector network analyzer measurements of the antenna's complex impedance across the operating bandwidth, then designs an L, Pi, or T network to transform that impedance to the 50-ohm system reference with minimal loss. Final optimization requires iterating on component values with production-tolerance Monte Carlo analysis, since parasitic inductance and capacitance of physical SMD components shift the match from ideal calculations, especially above 2 GHz.

RF interference mitigation combines shielding, filtering, physical separation, and grounding strategies tailored to the specific coupling mechanism. Board-level techniques include isolating RF sections with ground-stitched shield fences, routing sensitive traces on inner layers between ground planes, and using ferrite beads on power supply lines. System-level strategies such as frequency planning and spread-spectrum clocking address interference that board-level measures alone cannot eliminate.

Wireless coexistence testing evaluates how multiple radio technologies like Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, LTE, and GPS perform when operating simultaneously within the same device, measuring desensitization, throughput degradation, and latency impact caused by inter-radio interference. Failing to perform coexistence testing is one of the most common causes of post-launch performance complaints, as issues only manifest when all radios operate concurrently under real-world conditions.

RF power amplifier design centers on achieving the required output power and efficiency while maintaining linearity measured by EVM and ACLR for modulated signals. The choice of amplifier class (A, AB, Doherty, envelope tracking) determines the efficiency-linearity tradeoff, with modern handset PAs using envelope tracking to achieve 40 to 50 percent efficiency with complex modulation schemes like 256-QAM OFDM.

Software-defined radio replaces fixed analog RF processing with wideband digitization using high-speed ADCs and DACs positioned close to the antenna, moving channel selection, filtering, and demodulation into digital signal processing on FPGAs or DSPs. Platforms like Analog Devices AD9361/AD9371 integrate dual-channel RF transceivers covering 70 MHz to 6 GHz, providing a complete analog front-end for custom waveform implementation.

5G mmWave design faces severe path loss requiring phased-array antenna architectures with 64 to 256 elements and beamforming to maintain viable link budgets. PCB material selection becomes critical above 10 GHz, necessitating low-loss laminates like Rogers RO4835 with tightly controlled dielectric properties. Component packaging transitions to antenna-in-package modules where the phased array and beamforming ICs are co-integrated to minimize interconnect losses.

Modern RF design relies on 3D full-wave solvers like Ansys HFSS and CST Studio Suite for antenna and package modeling, 2.5D planar solvers like Keysight ADS Momentum for PCB structures, and circuit-level simulators like Keysight ADS and Cadence AWR for system-level cascaded analysis. Co-simulation workflows link these tools so EM-extracted parasitic models feed directly into circuit simulations for accurate real-world performance prediction.