RF Link Budget Calculation Guide

When designing a wireless system, the ultimate goal is to broadcast a signal between two devices, each with their own antennas and unique equipment for collecting and conditioning signals. The portion of signal transmission over the air and across the interconnect leading to the transmission system will limit the total transmission distance. In RF design, an important design goal is to balance a distance limitation with the complexity of the signal conditioning chain in the transmitting and receiving systems.

A useful metric used to examine the effectiveness of an interconnect for transferring signal in a wireless system is the RF link budget. This metric gives the amount of power a receiving component can expect to see given all the possible gains and losses encountered by a wireless signal as it propagates between two devices. In this article, we’ll show how to calculate the important values that go into a link budget calculation and the over-the-air propagation losses in a wireless channel.

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Team SimTech
Cadence Design Systems