New-Tech Europe | June 2017

Accelerating RF Component Selection with Yoni2® Advanced Search Engine for RF Components

Brandon Kaplan, Mini-Circuits

search results reflect an accurate andrealisticevaluationof product performance within the customer’s application bandwidth. This article will clarify the distinction between Yoni2 and other RF component search engines and explain the advantages associated with the more sophisticated search methodology of the Yoni2 program. Supplier Specs – A Convenient Reduction Suppliers provide performance specsas a quick, convenient way to evaluate “ballpark” product performance for a given parameter of interest. Theseare single values that the manufacturer can conservatively guarantee the product will meet within a reasonable margin across its operating frequency range. This

“plug-and-chug” task of product selection. This technology represents an innovation in customer support in the RF component space, but as with many things, the devil’s in the details. Component search engines give engineers the speed and efficiency of computing horsepower, but because most simply search supplier specs against customer criteria, they come with inherent limitations, often generating false positive and false negative results, and failing to accurately and completely identify the ideal parts for a given application. To address this problem, Mini-Circuits developed Yoni2,an advanced, patented search engine for RF components. Its purpose is not only give customers a much faster way to identify parts that meet their design requirements, but also to ensure that

Selecting RF components for a system design can be one of the more time- consuming tasks in the development cycle. To begin with, a designer may have to sift through hundreds of possible options for a suitable model. Each model represents a matrix of features and parameters with varying degrees of form, fit, and function compatibility with the design requirements. Evaluating the options may take hours or even days, and once a suitable part is identified, there’s still an element of uncertainty as to whether another model may have achieved better system performance. It’s the proverbial needle-in-a-stack- of-needles problem. Naturally, some RF component suppliers have built databases of product information and developed search engines to speed up the

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