Business-Impact-Marki-Microwave

Business Impact Case Study:
Marki Microwave, Inc.
Marki Microwave Combines Microwave Office®
with Revolutionary Manufacturing Process for
Successful Custom Mixer Designs
OVERVIEW
CUSTOMER PROFILE
Company:
Marki Microwave’s goal is to invent technologies to empower the RF and microwave
Marki Microwave is a leading
industry to design faster, simplify production, eliminate complexity, and shatter
manufacturer of high performance
performance barriers. This goal is achieved through intensive research, product
microwave and millimeter-wave
development, and advanced and carefully controlled production. The company has a
components.
multi-decade legacy designing high-performance microwave components, demonstrating
Challenge:
technical leadership through collaboration with thousands of customers. Its extensive
Design and manufacture more
knowledge base is enhanced with state-of-the art test and measurement equipment
compact mixers at a faster and
(capable of measurements from DC to 67GHz). Designs are validated using both the
cost-scalable rate while maintaining
most sophisticated CAD and simulation software available and proprietary design
signature quality and performance.
software. All assembly and test is performed under the supervision of the design
Solution:
Transition the company to a new
engineers at the same facility. Assembly capabilities include precision leaded and leadfree solder and wire bonding for gold/thin film assembly.
design paradigm leveraging a new
These capabilities lead to a portfolio of high-performance components, including
mixer manufacturing process
broadband, low conversion loss, and highly linear mixers, high directivity, low return loss
combined with simulation software,
putting Marki on a path toward
“right the first time” design
methodology and ushering in a new
means for manufacturing future
microwave components.
Results:
Small footprint, high performing
and volume manufacturable mixer
components.
couplers and directional bridges, well-balanced power dividers and hybrid couplers, and
many other quality products.
CHALLENGE
A family owned and run business founded by Ferenc Marki, Marki Microwave has quickly
become the premier high performance mixer vendor in the world. Ferenc developed a
very detailed, handcrafted design process to produce the highest quality mixers that
“go the extra mile” for customers who expect the highest performance available in the
smallest footprint.
Yet, as with all labor intensive manufacturing, scaling towards higher volumes remained
a challenge. It was also difficult to develop next-generation mixer designs so as to be
compact enough to fit into shrinking footprints. Despite the industry-leading performance
“Marki has a stellar reputation
of its mixers, Marki had reached the fundamental limit on how small a mixer could be
for the highest quality, highest
built by hand. Following Ferenc’s philosophy of being the “Mercedes of your niche,” the
performance mixers on the
company knew that it must overcome these challenges in order to continue to innovate
and advance the technology of its mixers.
Meanwhile, Ferenc’s son Christopher, after completing his PhD in engineering at UC
San Diego in 2007, spent the next four years investigating methods to transition the
market. Unfortunately, traditional
design and manufacturing
practices began to restrict our
company onto a new design paradigm leveraging electronic design automation (EDA)
ability to innovate towards the
simulation software and integrated circuit (IC) processes in order to design more
concomitant goals of higher
compact mixers with the same top quality and performance as the current hand
performance, smaller size, faster
crafted ones, but constructed using modern manufacturing techniques.
optimization and customization,
SOLUTION
and scalable manufacturing...”
In the end, Christopher struck gold with the development of a revolutionary, patent-
-Christopher Marki
pending mixer manufacturing process called Microlithic™ multi-layer process, which he
Director of Operations
complements with the use of simulation software. The new simulation route relies upon
Marki Microwave, Inc.
AWR’s Microwave Office® (MWO) software / EM simulation of passives. In essence,
www.markimicrowave.com
the resulting Microwave Office mixer design produces exceptionally good results when
compared to measured data—in some instances (almost) too good to be true, but true
nonetheless. Marki Microwave uses a complex, three-stage design cycle. First, develop
and calculate the concept, then simulate to validate the concept and optimize to analyze
the overall design space and narrow the focus, and, finally, run an EM simulation to build
models and optimize.
The new Microwave Office simulation-driven mixers were developed over a 12-month
period with thousands of simulations ultimately being conducted for optimization, tuning,
sensitivity studies, yield analysis, etc. Results for first, second, and third generation
designs went from promising to encouraging to excellent, and Christopher refined his
EDA process after each design cycle to understand the strengths and weaknesses of
both his simulations and his measurements. In fact, simulations were used to quickly
diagnose faulty vector network analyzer (VNA) calibrations because the team expected
the mixer to perform better during probe tests. Christopher states, “This was a clear
case of the ‘tail wagging the dog’. Normally, when the experiment differs from the
simulation, I blame the simulation. Now, I believe the simulation and blame my test
equipment.”
Having completed countless design iterations and fabrication runs, Marki engineers can
now quickly modify designs and study them in real time with MWO. Total design time has
been reduced to a matter of hours and the fabricated designs agree with the simulation
almost every time. Traditional legacy mixer designs would have taken several weeks to
optimize and would have required as many as 10 prototypes before the product was
ready for customer evaluation.
The benefits of the Microwave Office simulation process are a 14x size reduction,
highest industry performance, and scalable manufacturing. The company is now able to
manufacture on a multi-layer substrate (and no longer by hand alone), meaning that the full
benefits of simulation can be realized, putting the company on a path toward a “right the
first time” design methodology that will ultimately yield fewer design cycles and faster time to
“It would have been impossible
market. Christopher Marki believes this is the first-ever high-performance mixer circuit to be
to invent the Microlithic mixer
constructed using such a platform and a thin film multi-layer architecture. It will also likely
without adopting AWR’s
Microwave Office simulation
technology . By using a
modern CAD approach, we
usher in a new era for the manufacture of future Marki Microwave components.
WHAT’S NEXT
Marki Microwave’s mixer is not the end product per se. The company also envisions
providing its customers with a Microwave Office behavioral model of the design (three-port
black-box model) such that customers can design Marki Microwave world-class mixers
successfully condensed four
into their end circuits, systems, and sub-assemblies, allowing them to harness the same
decades of hard-earned mixer
power and advantages of a simulation-driven design methodology that Marki has found so
design knowledge into 12
enabling. Today, customers can obtain S-parameter models of mixers, but these are only a
months of intense simulation
and hardware development.
Designing in software has saved
us incalculable amounts of time
and money.”
-Christopher Marki
snapshot in time. With Marki Microwave’s behavioral mixer model approach, the dynamic
behavior of these models will give customers the ability to learn while designing.
Similarly, Marki Microwave’s recently launched “shareware” spur calculator utility
further enables customers to determine the nonlinear performance of these parts
prior to purchase/selection. Compared to legacy mixers, Microlithic mixers perform as
well or better in all important mixer specifications. Future efforts are being dedicated
to increasing mixer bandwidth, developing miniaturized IQ, IR, and SSB mixers, and
creating Microlithic versions of Marki’s high linearity T3 mixer line.
The new Microlithic mixers are only 1/14th the size of the originals and volume
manufacturable, thus realizing the benefits of this new simulation paradigm. The
company envisions that all mixers and likely most all legacy designs of Marki Microwave
will be offered in the platform and simulation–driven design methodology, which relies
upon AWR’s Microwave Office circuit design environment. Marki Microwave views the
repeatability and reliability of the simulation driven design paradigm as a necessity
to maximize the value of its mixer products and meet the omnipresent challenges of
smaller size, higher performance, lower cost, and faster time to market.
BUSINESS BENEFITS
RESULTS
Marki Microwave’s efforts to combine modern fabrication techniques with state-of-the-art
CAD software have resulted in a new, transformational technology. This significant leap
14X reduction in size (mixer footprint)
Tens of dB improvement in performance
(isolation / spurious rejection)
2X faster design cycle time
forward in RF and microwave mixer technology impacts every aspect of the company’s
business, from engineering support to production to R&D.
The hallmark of any revolutionary technology is its ability to shatter performance barriers.
In this case, Microlithic mixers achieve the rare combination of dramatic size reduction
(14x) without sacrificing Marki’s industry-leading electrical performance. Additionally, by
Five-fold increased in factory capacity
iterating the designs in software, a much deeper understanding of the device behavior can
throughput
be studied, and the results demonstrate the Microlithic mixers are not only as good as
legacy designs…but better! The ability to optimize the mixers in simulation has resulted in
10 to 20dB improvement in critical isolation specs. This improved isolation, in turn, contributes to a further reduction in unwanted nonlinear distortion. As Christopher explains,
“Modern systems are usually limited by the distortion generated by the mixer. Microlithic
mixers satisfy the critical need of improved spurious rejection by providing software-optimized balance without the need for hand tuning.”
From a strategic point of view, the Microlithic mixers enable Marki to target both high
volume and small volume applications. Owing to the speed of the CAD tools, new designs
and improvements can be studied in a matter of hours—instead of days—to address
new customer opportunities. Moreover, since the end product does not require hand
assembly, efficient volume ramp up is possible without undue investment in operational
infrastructure. The complementary nature of the Microlithic design flow means that
the new products can coexist with the legacy products without causing a strain on the
production floor, or causing disruptions for existing customers.
Finally, the concept of supplying Microwave Office simulation models to customers is an
unprecedented breakthrough. Since the mixer has previously been the weak link in system
simulations, an accurate mixer model will allow for accurate system models. The ability to
test and debug in simulation will save customers tremendous amounts of money. The cost
of purchasing multiple components in expensive connectorized packages, breadboarding
a system, and using expensive test equipment to characterize it can cost $10K or more
and many weeks to prototype. Even worse, a surface-mount design considering multiple
mixers with different footprints would require multiple prototype boards to be fabricated,
taking up valuable months to prototype. Not only will accurate models allow existing
customers to save time and money, it will also give them more insight into important
engineering trade-offs, and enable them to anticipate design pitfalls. The end goal of the
behavioral models is, as Christopher explains, “to clearly demonstrate the predictable and
transparent behavior of our mixers in complex systems, and lift the veil of confusion that a
mixer’s performance is black magic.”
Copyright © 2013 AWR Corporation. All rights reserved. AWR and Microwave Office are registered trademarks and
the AWR logo is a trademark of AWR Corporation. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade
names of their respective companies.
BI-MARKI-2013.8.9
AWR Corporation | www.awrcorp.com
info@awrcorp.com | +1 (310) 726-3000