Near-Zero Spike Leakage Of Marki Schottky Diode Limiters

Over the past few weeks, we have spent a considerable amount of time here at Marki Microwave studying the performance of our limiters. Our goal has been to understand how our customers typically use limiters, what problems they typically run into when integrating limiters into their systems, and whether we are able to solve any these problems for them.

In our first publication on limiters, we investigated ‘The Self Jamming Problem’ which occurs when limiters are placed in radar systems. In summary, the problem is that when a limiter receives a high-power pulse, there is a time delay between when the pulse turns off and when the limiter can receive small signal information again. This is called the recovery time and the shorter the recovery time, the less time your receiver spends in the dark. We showed experimentally that the Marki Microwave HLM and DLM limiters have a nearly instantaneous recovery times making them ideal candidates for systems that require extremely fast recovery times.

How Do Marki Limiters Respond to Pulses?

This result got us thinking about what implications this has on the performance of our limiters in pulsed applications beyond recovery time. In the past, we have had customers request more detailed information on the output power versus input power, and relationship when the input is pulsed with various duty cycles. Using the results of the recovery time experiments from the tech note linked above, one can reason to themselves that since our limiters respond to a pulse instantaneously that the output power versus input power would be independent of pulsed or CW inputs.