Semiconductors / Integrated Circuits

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A new substrate technology has been developed that addresses the dense component placement, high heat dissipation, harsh environments and high frequencies associated with high performance devices such as microwave amplifiers for base stations, broadband amplifiers designed into multi-media networks, and high power microwave power combiners with on-board terminations. The...

Due to the fast growing demand for broadband wireless communications, the operating frequency is moving toward the 5 GHz U-NII band. With a maximum data rate of 54 Mbps, the IEEE 802.11a wireless LAN (WLAN) standard specifies a 300 MHz allocation of spectrum in the 5 GHz range that...

Modern commercial and military communication systems require high efficiency, long term operating conditions. For this purpose, the power amplifiers, as final and highly current-consuming transmitter elements, are developed using the high efficiency class B, F or E modes of operation, depending on the technical requirements. In class B operation,...

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,...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Series- and parallel-combining of surface-mount capacitors is a standard approach to realize semi-arbitrary capacitance when designing a printed circuit board layout. This pairing of components is often necessary as surface-mount parts are available in only a limited number of fixed values, such as 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 pF. This article...

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standard Wideband Code-Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) was derived from code-division multiple access (CDMA), and is officially known today as IMT-2000 direct spread. It is a third-generation (3G) mobile wireless technology offering much higher data speeds to mobile and portable wireless devices than commonly offered...