New-Tech Europe Magazine | May 2018

of approximately 20 dB to properly buffer mismatch in the receiver path. Mini-Circuits is currently developing couplers with a frequency range from 20 to 40 GHz, which are ideal for this application. The up/down-converter is totally independent of the VNA system, and most of the VNA functions are totally transparent through the converter. The operator can adjust input power, perform power sweeps, linear segment sweeps, and logarithmic sweeps with the assumption that all frequencies applied to DUT are multiplied by a factor of 4. The overall loss of signal through converter should be less than 23 dB, which should not be an issue for most VNAs. VNA setups with up/down- conversion like those shown in Figure 4 and Figure 5 can be especially useful for high volume pass/fail production testing where the need for high frequency component testing often runs up against budget constraints. Putting It All Together: Interconnection and Integration The test setups illustrated here consist of various combinations

Figure 5: Functional block diagram of a setup to perform vector corrected testing between 24 and 30 GHz on DUT with a 6 GHz Vector Network Analyzer.

Figure 6: Left to right, Mini-Circuits NM-NM50+, SM-SM50+, and KM-KM50+ adapters