Description
A paper presented at the 1989 IEEE MTTS by Robert H. Caverly and Gerald Hiller showed that the distortion caused by RF switches utilizing reverse biased PIN diodes can compromise system performance in RF communication systems. Their paper presented equations predicting the two tone intermodulation distortion intercept points of IP2 and IP3 for switches utilizing series connected reverse biased PIN diodes. This thesis presents equations predicting the nonlinear response of an RF switch utilizing a shunt connected reverse biased PIN diode to a narrowband excitation possessing an arbitrary spectrum. The equations predict the amplitude and phase of the spectral content generated by the switch's nonlinearity in the neighborhood of the fundamental, as well as the second and third harmonics of the excitation's center of frequency. These equations are also used to derive a formula predicting the RF switch's performance under a noise power ratio (NPR) measurement.
