PIM characteristics of resistive loads

Passive intermodulation (PIM) characteristics of resistive components are experimentally investigated. Resistive dummy loads and attenuator are employed as DUTs, and they are evaluated by the 2-tone test in 2GHz band. It is shown that the PIM has saturation characteristics for high power excitation such as 43dBm /spl times/ 2-tone although it obeys to the ideal theory in low power excitation. The saturation in the high power excitation is also evaluated with the slope factor introduced in this paper, which shows a difference in PIM saturation characteristics between resistive load and nonresistive element. By circuit simulation, the influence of resistance value on PIM level is investigated. PIM reduction technique by using attenuators is also proposed and its validity is confirmed by experiment.