1. Purpose and scope
Qualification shows that the product will keep its performance over its life in the conditions customers will use it in. For RF products the usual temperature, humidity, life and package stresses are joined by RF-specific ones: operating life at high output power, survival when an amplifier drives a badly mismatched load, and drift of gain, power and leakage over time. Compound semiconductor technologies such as gallium nitride have failure mechanisms of their own that the plan must cover. Modules add the reliability of substrates, filters, solder joints and moulding.
Production test runs alongside. RF parameters are expensive to test: they need RF instruments, test hardware that holds calibration across thousands of insertions, and correlation to the bench so that limits mean the same on the tester as in the datasheet. This stage builds and releases that test. It ends at the production release, when qualification has passed, the production RF test is released and correlated, the compliance and materials records are complete, and the part may be ordered in volume.
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