Automated measurement setup for Ku band MMIC characterization

An automated measurement setup for characterization of 10-signal port MMICs is described in this paper as an opportunity for fast, comparative and enough accurate 100-percent control of their important parameters: insertion gain, insertion phase, phase step and return losses. The particular application of the tested devices is phase control and signal summation in multi-layer antenna arrays in the Ku-band. A phantom verification of all the embedding paths combined with utilization of mixed measurement techniques (both frequency and time domain VNA options) is applied for the phantom parameter characterization. That allows better extraction of the reflected, as well as the transmitted S-parameters of the non-symmetrical 10-port test fixture used. The estimation of the measurement tolerances gives the following intervals for the standard deviation of the controlled parameters from the mean values caused by the measurement reproducibility: /spl plusmn/0.1 dB for the insertion losses and /spl plusmn/1.0 deg for the phase shift. These values are much smaller than the acceptable deviation for the MMICs parameters: /spl plusmn/0.55 dB and /spl plusmn/7.0 deg for the gain and phase, respectively. Therefore, the test procedure with the considered automated setup gives statistically significant results for a great number of controlled MMICs.