22-year-old RF Engineer
Meet EM Solutions’ bright spark, Marshall Lewis – an incredibly talented RF Engineer with a great list of achievements to his name at just 22 years of age.
Just two years ago Marshall was an Engineering student at the University of Queensland who came to EM Solutions to gain real-world experience. Last year, Marshall graduated with first class honours and was awarded a university medal for achieving a near perfect GPA over the four years of his degree. Now he’s working fulltime with EM on a range of ground-breaking projects and presenting his ideas to international satcom specialist forums.
In September 2015, EM Solutions co-hosted the 33rd AIAA International Communications Satellite Systems Conference (ICSSC) on the Gold Coast and called for White Paper submissions. Marshall saw this as a great opportunity to share his thoughts and ideas for the Satcom space and so wrote and submitted a paper using his thesis (which he also completed while doing work experience at EM) as a background to the topic, “Analog Predistortion Linearizer for a Gallium Nitride Power Amplifier”. The panel chose his paper over several hundred to be among those presented at the conference and Marshall was advised to prepare for his presentation.
The paper discussed his linearizer that has been produced to linearize a 200W C Band Gallium Nitride solid-state power amplifier. Marshall’s design was developed based on the method of correcting phase and gain distortion. The linearizer successfully increases the effective output power of the amplifier by at least 1dB for 5.85GHz-6.725GHz, keeping IM3 levels at lower than -22dBc. The device also improves the flatness of the gain vs. input power transfer function of the amplifier over a wide range of input powers and across the frequency band. This linearizer gives a reasonable improvement in intermodulation distortion correction and gain vs. input power flatness compared to other linearizers of similar complexity, cost and size.
Alongside developing a successful linearizer, presenting at the ICSSC is one of Marshall’s proudest career moments to date. He considered the ICSSC an excellent chance to not only get in front of some of the top Satcom Industry leaders but to also learn more about innovations and projects that we can expect to see in the near future. The ICSSC had over 70 international presenters including six EM Solutions staff and Marshall thoroughly enjoyed their white paper presentations understanding what each of these individuals and groups have been working on.
The next focus for Marshall, and indeed for most of EM Solutions, is supporting works on the Comms-on-the-Move terminals. There are a number of elements and facets involved in developing robust, accurate and reliable COTMs and Marshall finds it all quite fascinating and is glad to be a part of the EM Team.
Marshall is also looking forward to the upcoming IMS conference in the US in 2016 and will be modifying his White Paper and submitting for this event as well. Watch this space!
