Waveform engineering: State-of-the-art and future trends (invited paper)

The term waveform engineering denotes all those circuit design techniques that are based on shaping the transistor voltage and current waveforms. From a general perspective, these design techniques can be grouped in two main categories according to the adopted design tool: measurement- and model-based. In the last two decades, thanks to the proliferation of setups enabling calibrated waveform acquisition at microwave frequencies, waveform engineering has attracted continuously increasing interest in the microwave engineering community. In this article, a comprehensive analysis of the waveform-engineering based design techniques is reported, paying particular attention to the advantages and drawbacks associated to each approach.