Section: Application Domains

Stability of high frequency amplifiers

Participants : Sébastien Fueyo, Gilles Lebeau, Jean-Baptiste Pomet, Laurent Baratchart [FACTAS project-team] .

Nonlinear hyper-frequency amplifiers are ubiquitous in cell phone relays and many other devices. They must be as compact as possible, yielding a more complicated design. Computer Assisted Design tools are extensively used; for a given amplifier design, they provide frequency responses but fail to provide information of the stability of the response for each frequency. This stability is crucial for an unstable response will not be observed in practice; the actual device should not be built before stability is asserted. Predicting stability/instability from “simulations” in the Computer Assisted Design tool is of utmost importance (simulation between quotation marks because these simulations are in fact computations in the frequency domain). Potential transfer is important.

Some techniques do exist, see [77], based on creating some virtual perturbations and treating them as the input of a (linearized) control system to be “simulated” using the same tools. In an ongoing collaboration between McTAO and the project-team FACTAS, we work on the mathematical ground of these methods and in particular of the relation between stability and the property of the identified time-varying infinite dimensional systems. See recent developments in Section 7.14.