Industry News

The Commercial Market

The Commercial Market MEMS Moves Stealthily into the Wireless Sector Driven by innovation, pushed by legislation, and pulled by market need, wireless MEMS will experience strong growth in the next couple of years. In-Stat/ MDR reports that worldwide revenues for wireless MEMS (in the form of RF MEMS components...
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The Book End

Compact and Broadband Microstrip Antennas Kin-Lu Wong John Wiley & Sons Inc. 327 pages; $94.95 ISBN: 0-471-41717-3 Modern portable communication equipment requires compact, broadband microstrip antennas. This book is intended to present new advanced designs of this type of antenna, offering more than 100 advanced microstrip antenna designs and...
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A Fast and Flexible Circuit Board Plotter

When employing circuit board plotters for product development the main requirement is for fast, efficient and flexible operation. Consequently, the high costs incurred by the long waiting periods inherent when externally procuring circuit board prototypes, particularly those with RF substrates, can be avoided. The ProtoMat 95s/II meets these requirements,...
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Active Multipliers and Dividers to Simplify Synthesizers

A new family of active frequency multipliers and dividers is featured this month
Modern frequency synthesis uses a combination of frequency multiplication and frequency division to generate the required data and carrier signals for microwave radio and radar applications. Frequency multiplication increases the carrier frequency while increasing the phase noise of the carrier by 20log(N), where N is the multiplication factor. Conversely,...
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Precision Eb/No Generators for BER Testing to 44 GHz

With the continually increasing complexity of digital modulation techniques employed in wireless and satellite communications systems, instruments that accurately generate and maintain a set level of bit energy-to-noise density ratio (E b /N o ) have become valued tools in optimizing bit-error rate (BER) performance. These instruments have been...
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A Cost-effective 2 W GaAs MMIC Amplifier Solution

GaAs HBT technology has been successfully deployed for low to mid-power MMIC RF amplifiers in recent years. EiC Corp. pioneered the use of an InGaP emitter for RF power amplifiers and first introduced gain block products in 1998. InGaP/GaAs HBT devices have proven to provide better performance and be...
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Effects of AM/AM and AM/PM Distortion on Spectral Regrowth in 3GPP W-CDMA BS Power Amplification

The effects of amplitude and phase nonlinearities in a power amplifier, which lead to spectral regrowth, are examined in the context of a 3GPP W-CDMA forward link (base station) environment. Behavioral modeling and simulation techniques are applied fir...
The transmitter unit, contained in base stations for third generation cellular systems, requires a linear power amplifier to preserve signal integrity when amplifying composite signals associated with multiple channels. While the power amplifier must meet a number of requirements to be system level compliant, the design process generally emphasizes...
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Practical Design Consideration of a Modified Structure for a Planar Multiport Power Divider at 2 GHz

This article proposes a modified structure at 2 GHz of IMT-2000 for the planar multiport power divider published in the literature.8-10 Design parameters for the practical realization of the structure have also been investigated using HFSS (...
A power divider is a basic microwave and millimeter-wave circuit dividing the input RF power by an arbitrary ratio. This circuit has a wide range of applications such as antenna systems, power amplifiers, power oscillators, balanced mixers and so on. Multiport power dividers/combiners have been used in power amplifiers...
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Using Load Pull Analysis and Device Model Validation to Improve MMIC Power Amplifier Design Methodologies

This article describes a methodology for the design of a 2 GHz monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) power amplifier (PA) using a heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) process. It is based on the use of modern software tools and advanced loa...
There is certainly no shortage of information about designing power amplifiers these days, and several books address the subject quite admirably. 1-6 However, as well as these books cover the theory and underlying logic of such designs, they do not tell the reader precisely how to do it. As...
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