The AM9018 from Mercury Systems is a Miniature Heterodyne MMIC Tuner Module that operates from 900 MHz to 18 GHz. It is designed for high-performance and low-SWaP systems. This tuner consists of a control FPGA, power and control line filtering, an input limiter, and sub-octave preselectors. It also includes pre-amplifiers, local oscillators, frequency converters, ADC driver amplifiers, and a temperature sensor. This heterodyne receiver tuner incorporates two analog IF output channels, with each channel providing an output with a bandwidth of 1 GHz. The receiver can also be coherently combined with multiple tuner sets for multi-channel receiver applications. It provides a gain of 24 dB and has a tuning speed of 100 µs. This tuner has a noise figure of 14 dB, an LO leakage of -70 dBm, and a phase noise of -90 dBc/Hz (at 1 kHz offset).
The AM9018 is provided with an evaluation board and a GUI for controlling the module (independently or coherently) via the USB interface. This MMIC module can be tested by generating a 10 MHz reference input from the test equipment or a 100 MHz input directly from a signal generator. The receiver uses the built-in sensor to monitor the device temperature and ensure high reliability. It requires a DC supply of 3.3/5 V and consumes less than 6 W of power. This miniature tuner is available as a module that measures 1.400 x 3.000 x 0.270 inches and can be easily mounted to a host circuit board for use in multi-channel receiver applications.
