Freelance electronics engineer with 15+years specializing in short-range radio connections.

Services

Consultancy

Radio link system level design and regulatory aspects for future or existing IoT products.

Regulatory compliance

Validating your product against the relevant RF/EMC regulatory standards.

Measurement & validation

Assisting clients with interpreting, implementing and automating RF measurement procedures.

Debugging

Helping you in finding the root cause of performance issues or failing RF/EMC regulatory results.

Design

Full IoT radio connectivity design from hardware to firmware with my fellow freelancer peers.

Documentation

Consise and tidy writing of measurement reports, technical reports or application notes.

For startups to large enterprises
For existing or future products
For remote or on-site work
For products failing or to be improved

About

Zoltán Papp is an experienced RF application engineer based in Budapest, Hungary. He has been working since 2005 in various RF application engineer positions in Hungary and England.

In the past years he was a delegate to ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) allowing him to be up-to-date with European radiofrequency regulations. He set his focus on various radio link weaknesses, performance improvements, achieving certain performance criteria - let it be hardware or radio configuration related.

He went freelancing in 2020 to embrace new technologies.

Freelance Application Engineer

Self-employed

2020 - / Hungary

Staff Application Engineer

Silicon Labs

2011 - 2020 / Hungary

RF Evaluation Engineer

MediaTek

2007 - 2010 / England

Test Engineer

Integration Associates Inc.

2006 - 2007 / Hungary

Test Engineer

Jabil Global Services

2005 - 2006 / Hungary

Project insights

  1. Measurements
  2. Application solutions
  3. Regulatory / application standards
I have done this multiple times in my career. DUTs were always RF transceiver ICs. The data collection setup was a set of rack based (mostly RF) instruments augmented with a temperature forcing device. The DUTs were hooked up to the various measurement devices via switch matrices (RF, Baseband and DC) so all the required (Tx, Rx, DC, miscellaneous) measurements could be done without reconfiguring the setup. Automation was done either with AgilentVEE or NI Labview or Matlab. The data collection stations were used for characterisation and debug purposes.

Skills: Automated measurements, LabView, Agilent Vee, Matlab
Rx side spatial antenna diversity performance comes down to two most important factors: how much improvement it brings to link budget in a fading prone environment and what is the shortest training sequence (hence lowest power consumption penalty) it can robustly run on. I led the activity of fine tuning algorithm parameters with the help of conducted and radiated test setups built for the purpose to meet certain performance criteria in both metrics on multiple product lines.

Skills: Automated measurements, Agilent Vee, Signal processing
One of the TRX IC products I worked on offered a rather novel fast signal detection capability that had attractive benefits: faster Rx channel scan turnaround times, lower Rx current consumption via duty cycling the device between Rx and idle states. I supervised performance validation and enhancements on the algorithm to maintain performance (sensitivity and robustness mainly) or control the performance loss (frequency offset tolerance and sensitivity mostly) over a range of preamble lengths.

Skills: Automated measurements, Agilent Vee, Signal processing
One of the PXI based RF generator test setup I was working on started producing intermittent Rx packet losses we could not quite explain with the DUT behavior. After instrumenting up the generator the dropped packets clearly correlated to a mid-packet frequency pull on the test signal. These, as turned out soon, were induced by the on/off switching of a high power equipment at the company next door. A UPS between the mains and the generator fixed the issue.

Skills: Automated measurements, Agilent Vee, PXI instrumentation
In this rather demanding project the Rx performance had to be optimized simultaneously meeting stringent requirements on sensitivity, frequency offset tolerance, data rate offset tolerance, selectivity, blocking and resilience in packet collision events. Since optimizing for one may hit another this project was all about iteratively turning the knobs and taking a big set of measurement data making sure no adverse effects were caused.

Skills: Automated measurements, Agilent Vee, Radio architectures