Peregrine Semiconductor has expanded its DuNE‘™ Digitally Tunable Capacitor (DTC) product line with six second-generation devices for antenna tuning in 4G LTE smartphones. The PE623060, PE623070, PE623080, and PE623090 (PE6230x0) DTCs have a capacitance range of 0.6 to 7.7 pF and support main antenna power handling of up to +34 dBm. The PE621010 and PE621020 (PE6210x0) DTCs have a capacitance range of 1.38 to 14.0 pF and are optimized for power handling of up to +26 dBm, making them well suited for diversity antennas. All of the new DTCs are manufactured on Peregrine’s UltraCMOS® “technology process, with HaRP‘technology enhancements that enable the devices to meet the challenging harmonic and linearity requirements of LTE. The highly-versatile devices support a wide variety of tuning circuit topologies, with an emphasis on impedance matching and aperture-tuning applications. They extend Peregrine’s high-performance tuning roadmap, which was first introduced to the market in 2008.
Smartphones are now required to support a subset of the more than 40 different LTE frequency bands, as well as MIMO and carrier aggregation. To keep up, these devices now contain multiple antennas, making it difficult to keep the end device thin and slim. Tuning the antenna solution with DuNE DTCs enables the system to support multiple bands, while at the same time reducing antenna size and providing optimal RF performance.
With PE6230x0 and PE6210x0 DTCs, all tuning functions, including bias generation, integrated RF filtering and bypassing, control interface, and ESD protection of 2 kV HBM, are incorporated into a slim, 2 × 2 × 0.55 mm package. The new DTCs are available in 10- and 12-lead, 2 × 2 mm QFN packages.
Peregrine Semiconductor,
San Diego, CA
(858) 731-9400,
www.psemi.com