The day to day work as an engineer are sometimes less “engineering” than one would think. Put aside the actual engineering work, perhaps the biggest time consumer is the never-ending demand for meetings, and by extension, report making.
Whether it is presentation internally or to clients, it often goes together with our well-known (and infamous, depending how much you dread it) powerpoint slides, ’cause no presentation is complete without a slide deck to better present our thoughts, ideas and reports.
And for those who can relate will definitely agree that making such slides eats up valuable time, counted in hours of precious work time.
Making Reports in RF Engineering
Its the same when it comes to the RF field. Often times, discussions and presentations go hand-in-hand with charts demonstrating the performances and comparisons of RF components or products.
Many a day-to-day meetings are set up to discuss on the recent findings of simulation results such as S-parameters and Group Delay. These results are usually derived from touchstone files through capturing them from Vector Network Analyzers (VNA) setup to measure the RF output of the device under testing (DUT). Sometimes, the results are put in comparison with past instances of the results to find out how it has improved or deteriorate. Or they can be place in comparison with simulated results from EDA tools. These are often done in powerpoint slides to better facilitate discussions.
Besides presentations, researchers use touchstone files to create charts in papers and transcripts. Foundries and component makers use touchstone files to create RF characteristics charts for datasheets and documentations.
The Pain Point
Regardless of whether you are a RF engineer, academician or student, the most common pain point comes when trying to generate meaningful, presentable charts. More often than not, comparisons are done between touchstone files, or post-processing is needed to further analyze the data of the touchstone files.
For many in the industry, this is done through extensively curated excel macros to analyze and generate the graphs of the touchstone files. Not only is the method tedious, but there are less flexibility in generating results and creating nice visual representations.
Alternatively, one can uses existing EDA tools to view the touchstone files or directly screenshot or take a photo of the response from the VNAs. Neither of the methods are intuitive and most likely not suitable for use cases that requires comparison between multiple charts. In fact, some in desperation have resulted to use pirated EDA tools to open touchstone files only to be caught red-handed in the act by the EDA companies (true story).
Touchstone Viewer Studio
In FILPAL, we are no strangers to these issues since we are heavily involved in the RF industry. So when thinking of the next evolution for our Touchstone Viewer app, it only make sense to create a tool that:
- Enable quick and efficient way to open and compare touchstone files.
- Enable an easy way to generate nice visual representation and charts from touchstone files.
Riding on the efficiency from our previous Touchstone Viewer PRO, Touchstone Viewer Studio go a step further by adding a plethora of chart customization features to aid in report making.
And to our colleagues working in our RF hardware related projects as well as those generating datasheets from our hardware components, the tool helps to reduce time spent on generating charts from touchstone files for their many discussions and presentations.
A Tool for Touchstone Files Visual Representation
In Viewer Studio, the idea is to provide as much customization as possible to the chart. Some examples are:
- grid style
- legend style
- labels
- title
- font size, styles and weight
Traces are also heavily customizable. From the color, to the line style and thickness to the text in the labels. For some cases where comparison between files are needed, there is also option to color the traces by file.
Then there are the newly reformed markers. With point markers and line limits available to allow better representation and display of the chart.
All these can then be exported to JPG or PNG images, or simply screenshotted to be paste into reports!
Touchstone Viewer Studio will be available in February 2025!
Originally published at http://filpal.wordpress.com on January 31, 2025.
