Industry News

Russian/US MoU Sets New Standards

The Russian national standards body, the Russian Federal Agency on Technical Regulating and Metrology, has signed a historic Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ASTM International, originally known as the American Society for Testing and Materials. The goals of the MoU are to remove technical barriers in economic and trade...
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Alliance Agrees on Semiconductor Development

In a move that signals a firm and ongoing commitment to future technology leadership, IBM and its joint development alliance partners, Infineon Technologies AG and Freescale Semiconductor along with its Common Platform™ technology partners, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung Electronics, have signed a series of semiconductor process development and...
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NTT DoCoMo Funds Chinese Venture

NTT DoCoMo will invest $10 M with Gobi Fund II, L.P., a venture capital fund operated by Gobi Partners Inc. The Fund will target cutting-edge venture companies in China working on the convergence of telecommunications, media and technology within the IT and digital media sectors. Through its involvement with...
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The Book End

Design and Characterization of Integrated Varactors for RF Applications I Gutierrez, J. Melendez and E. Hernandez John Wiley & Sons Ltd. • 179 pages; $110 ISBN: 978-0-470-02587-1 This book introduces the reader to varactor design for RF applications in low cost technologies (CMOS, BiCMOS and SiGe) at different levels....
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Current Switch-off Solution to Protect RF Power Transistors During Measurements

A new security switch called “e-fuse” is presented here. It acts as a fuse in the bias feed, providing very fast switch-off times, thus protecting the device under test and the measurement equipment such as probe tips. It can be applied to FET-type ...
Microwave power transistors today can achieve output power levels greater than 100 W and there is more to come. In most cases, these transistors are also high voltage devices based on Si-LDMOS or GaN. In order to characterize such transistors during development, on-wafer measurements (of sub-cells) are an indispensable...
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Low Cost Signal Sources for Multi-band, Multi-mode Wireless Communication Systems

This article focuses on providing a cost-effective solution for multi-band, multi-mode wireless systems in which oscillators simultaneously satisfy the oscillation conditions of two or more signals, thereby obviating the need for several signal sources...
One of the critical building blocks in a multi-mode transceiver system is a multi-band VCO that is required for both up and down conversion. Mobile phones and radios, operating in several modes, are typically switching between receiving and transmitting frequencies, and therefore require low phase noise signal sources (oscillators/VCOs)...
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