Microwave Journal
www.microwavejournal.com/articles/28580-macom-demonstrates-rf-energy-toolkit

MACOM Demonstrates “RF Energy Toolkit”

June 6, 2017

MACOM Technology Solutions Inc. (MACOM) unveiled a beta development kit to help commercial OEMs quickly and easily adapt their product designs to use GaN RF energy sources in new applications, such as cooking, lighting, industrial heating and drying, medical and pharmaceutical and automotive ignition systems. By using solid-state, highly efficient RF energy as an energy source, commercial OEMs can achieve new levels of performance and affordability for future products.

MACOM’s new beta RF energy toolkit is available for trial, to help system designers simplify and accelerate product development by making it easy to fine tune RF energy output levels for efficiency and performance. Combining the benefits of MACOM’s GaN on Si power transistors with intuitive, flexible software and signal control capabilities, MACOM’s RF energy toolkit takes the guesswork out of the RF power source design, which enables faster time to market.

The MACOM GaN on Si power transistors supplied with the RF energy toolkit deliver up to 10 percent greater efficiency than comparably priced LDMOS transistors, which is a major benefit for continuous wave RF energy applications, where every incremental gain in efficiency translates to less power consumption and lower operating costs. System designers can select from a range of MACOM power transistors to meet power level requirements from 30 to 1000 W. The toolkit supports coherent channel operation, allowing multiple RF energy channels to be combined, for example 3 x 300 W or 2 x 500 W. Supported frequency bands range from 915 MHz to 2.45 GHz.

“Commercial OEMs are eager to seize the massive market opportunity for higher-performing RF energy-based systems enabled by GaN on Si, but they don’t want to invest the resources to architect the RF power elements themselves,” said Mark Murphy, senior director for RF Power at MACOM. “The RF energy toolkit lifts this design burden from the OEMs, and will help them get to market faster with their RF energy-based systems, by providing an affordable, easy-to-use platform that streamlines system design and lowers development costs.”

“The current RF energy toolkit offers the industry ‘a first’ in a number of ways: The kit is an easy-to-use, compact, very flexible controller that can run all alone, based on a very fast, hardware-based reflection coefficient optimization scheme,” said Klaus Werner, managing director of pinkRF, a MACOM design partner. “Alternatively, the kit can run complex recipes alone or in conjunction with other controllers, programmed remotely or embedded with any number of RF vectors (power, phase, frequency, time, energy) to control complex or variable processes. The tool hooks up to the power amplifier – no special integration is needed. I view it as an RF energy engineer’s ‘Swiss army knife’ to master, optimize and industrialize RF energy applications and their associated controllers.”

Beta-version RF energy toolkits are now available to qualified customers, with broader availability planned in the fall of 2017.

MACOM will showcase its new RF energy toolkit and industry leading GaN on Si product portfolio this week at IEEE’s International Microwave Symposium (IMS) 2017 in Honolulu, Hawaii. Attendees are invited to visit MACOM at Booth #1312.

For more information on MACOM’s RF Energy initiatives, visit: https://www.macom.com/rfenergy.