Automated Calibration System for RF Configurable Voltage-Controlled Filters

This brief presents a complete hardware-software system for automated calibration and test of RF, configurable voltage-controlled devices, such as active filters. The proposed system consists of a programmable interface, based on a microcontroller and high-resolution digital-to-analog converters, and a dedicated front-end with an optimization software, hosted on a computer. The designed software is able to communicate with the instrumentation (signal or vector analyzer) to which the tunable circuit is connected, and analyzing the run-time measured data the algorithm generates suitable tuning signals through the hardware interface connected to the device under test, therefore allowing to obtain the desired behavior and to calibrate the circuit. The proposed system has been tested on RF tunable active filters with good performances in terms of both convergence speed and accuracy.