Trusted Resource for the Working RF Engineer
Search MWRF
Home
Product Directory
Topics
Note Pad
electronica 2008
EuMW 2008
Back Issues
RF Blogs
Military Electronics
Subscribe
News
Online News
Design Features
Web Seminars
PartFinder
Whitepapers
Microwave Legends
Newsletter
WebConnect
RF Design
RSS
RSS
Sponsored Links
 |
December 2008 CMOS LNA Operates In Subthreshold Region BECAUSE THE LNA IS THE FIRST STAGE of a receiver system, an LNA’s noise figure will dominate a receiver’s overall performance. The LNA should therefore add little noise to the next stages while providing 50-O impedance match for maximum power transfer. It also should deliver enough gain for signal processing in the following stages. These goals were recently met by a 5.8-GHz, ISM-band, CMOS low-noise amplifier (LNA) that operates in a subthreshold... — Nancy Friedrich December 2008 Video Amplifiers Consume Less Than 12 mA AT 0.60 V/(H )0.5 input voltage noise performance, a new pair of high-speed video amplifiers claims to provide 30 percent less noise than the closest competitor in their class. Dubbed the CLC1001 and CLC1002, these amplifiers consume less than 13 mA of supply current. They also offer a disable feature that lowers the supply current to under 225 A. Both amplifiers exhibit 1 mV maximum input offset voltage and superior alternating- current (AC)... — Nancy Friedrich December 2008 ULP 2.4-GHz Chip Fits 4-x-4-mm Package ON A SINGLE CHIP, a new solution for the ultra-low-power (ULP) wireless market runs both the RF protocol stack and application layer. The nRF24LE1 system-ona- chip (SoC) integrates the nRF24L01+ 2.4-GHz transceiver core along with a mixed-signal, 8-b microcontroller with 16 kB of on-chip Flash memory. The transceiver core includes an Enhanced ShockBurst hardware link layer. It delivers ULP operation with peak currents that are low enough to... — Nancy Friedrich December 2008 Packaged MMICs Cover X-Band Systems THE 8-TO-12-GH X-BAND is home to many communications and radar technologies. To support those ever-evolving application areas, some packaged highpower- amplifier, monolithic-microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) provide moderate output power with high gain at X-band. These amplifiers cover the full X-band range in three separate bands. Model 560134, which targets 9-to-10.5-GHz applications, provides +37 dBm output power and 40-percent power added efficiency (PAE) for ... — Nancy Friedrich November 2008 1-V Transceiver SoC Serves Biotelemetry Applications Wireless technology has enabled biotelemetry applications that monitor vital signs like temperature and heart rate. At the heart of these applications are wireless body sensor networks, which comprise human-body-worn sensor nodes. These networks rely on modules that gather, store, and process the patient’s vital data before sending it to a central base station. For miniaturization, increased functionality, and a reduction in power consumption, however, the industry... — Nancy Friedrich October 2008 Book Report: CMOS RFIC Design Principles by Robert Caverly At one time, high-frequency engineers might have associated silicon CMOS processes with digital circuits or, at most, low-frequency RF devices. But with nanoscale fabrication processes improving, a variety of semiconductor companies and silicon foundries are pushing CMOS processes well into the millimeter-wave frequency range, to 60 GHz and beyond, in the hopes of finally commercializing millimeter-wave devices. To take advantage of this surging interest ... — Jack Browne October 2008 65-nm CMOS Houses 75-to-91-GHz Receiver Front End To determine a Gilbert mixer’s frequency response for each local oscillator (LO), RF, and intermediatefrequency (IF) stage, a measurement approach has been proposed by Jin-Siang Syu — Nancy Friedrich October 2008 Setting Strategies For Transmission Lines Last month, the first part of this article made recommendations for choosing the physical dimensions of stripline. A large height, H, ensures high power-handling capability. Smaller H requires a smaller strip for the same impedance, leading to higher losses. The thickness, h, of the suspended stripline dielectric substrate should be as small to minimize losses and parasitic inductance of vias, as well as to reduce cost. For slotline, the... — Leo G. Maloratsky October 2008 Two-Stage LDMOS RFIC Drives WiMAX Power amplifiers (PAs) for modern communications systems are generally designed by cascading and paralleling multiple RF transistors to achieve the required solid-state gain and power. With their wide range of impedancematching, optimization, and architectural options, single-stage discrete RF transistors offer a great deal of flexibility for power-amplifier designers, although with some loss of printedcircuit- board (PCB) space compared to RF... — Cedric Cassan , et al. September 2008 Transceiver-On-Chip Serves ZigBee Systems THE ZIC2410 SERIES of transceivers on a chip are designed for IEEE 802.15.4 ZigBee applications. The 2.4-to-2.483- GHz RF transceiver, which includes an 8051-based 8-b microprocessor, combines robust +8-dBm transmit output power with receiver sensitivity of -98 dBm, to deliver link-budget performance of 106 dB. The transceiver consumes less than 33.2 mA in receive mode and about 30 mA when transmitting at 0 dBm; standby current consumption is a mere 0.3 microamps. The ZIC2410... — Jack Browne September 2008 Converters Carry VNA To 325 GHz Millimeter-wave components are used in numerous radar systems and even in some guidance and tracking applications, although test equipment choices at frequencies above 30 GHz are somewhat limited. A few additional options in testing millimeter-wave components were added recently by long-time test-and-measurement-equipment supplier Rohde & Schwarz with the rm’s introduction of a line of millimeter-wave frequency converters for its high-performance vector... — Jack Browne August 2008 Digital Predistortion Linearizes Broadband PAs, Part 2 Power amplifiers (PAs) are essential to the transmitter sections of communications systems and in many other RF/microwave applications. As seen last month in Part 1 of this three-part series, the linearity of a power amplifier is often compromised for efficiency, but numerous digital predistortion techniques are available to help improve linearity without sacrificing efficiency. Part 2 of this threepart article series will offer some comparisons of different ... — Hardik Gandhi July 2008 Semiconductor Advances Propel High-Power Amps Improved linearity is one of the requirements for an effective wireless commuications transition from 2G series to 3G/4G systems, and high-performance RF transistors are vital to the amplifiers in these newer systems. As network operators transition from 2G services to 3G/4G systems, the role of highly efficient, highly linear RF transistors with higher operating voltages in base station amplifier designs become critical. Consequently, the technology that was... — Ashok Bindra July 10, 2008 Wimax Option Added To Modulator Range Nujira, Cambridge, England, has added a WiMAX optimised solution to its HAT envelope tracking modulator range for RF power amplifiers that have a TDD mode. TDD mode puts the PA in a low-power idle state during the receive interval — Paul Whytock June 16, 2008 Mobile TV And Digital Radio Tuner Housed In An RF-Tested Die A new RF tuner from Maxim Integrated Products is a triple-band, dual-mode mobile TV and digital radio in a fully RF-tested die. It supports implementation of system-in-package (SIP) designs — Lisa Maliniak June 2008 Single-Chip MIMO Transceiver Covers 2.3 To 2.7 GHz TO MAKE IT EASIER to build in mobile-WiMAX support, a single-chip, 2.3-to-2.7-GHz, multiple-inputmultiple- output (MIMO) RF transceiver has emerged. By using a dual-receiver architecture to mitigate RF channel fading, the MAX2839 is vowing to improve receiver signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by 10 dB compared to a single-receiver architecture. The transceiver’s two receivers feature a low noise figure at 2.3 dB and –81-dBm sensitivity for a ... — Nancy Friedrich May 2008 IDS Microchip Revolutionizes RFID Labeling/Tracking WOLLERAU, SWITZERLAND—A radio-frequencyidentification (RFID) chip is promising to make it practical for companies to automatically track, monitor, time-stamp, and record information about goods in any supply-chain or cold-chain transport on land, sea, or sky. Such goods may range from expensive fragile components, medical goods, and pharmaceuticals to bags of bananas . This innovation in affordable, automatic data-logging RFID applications hails from IDS Microchip... — Dawn Hightower May 2008 Large-Signal Approach Yields Low-Noise VHF/UHF Oscillators Last month, the first half of this article introduced the large-signal approach to oscillator design. This concluding section will offer some VHF/ UHF design examples, including the 144-MHz oscillator first presented last month in Part 1. The component values for the 144-MHz oscillator (C1, C2, C3, C4, and L) can be calculated in the following way. First, the values of capacitors C1 and... — Ulrich L. Rohde , et al. May 2008 Novel Approaches Vow To Upset The Status Quo Despite the constant innovation in the microwave industry, many products are rooted in the same technologies. Gallium arsenide (GaAs), for example, is at the heart of many of today’s advanced amplifiers and other active components. Amidst this seeming status quo, however, lurk new innovations that could change the way that many products are made. These “disruptive technologies” can take the form of brand-new, completely novel approaches that have never... — Nancy Friedrich May 2008 LTCC Arms Mixer For 7.3-To-20.0-GHz Systems Frequency conversion is one of the more critical functions within the RF/microwave portion of a highfrequency system. In spite of continuing advances in the speed and bit resolution of analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), they rely on a frequency mixer to translate high-frequency signals within their bandwidth range. The model SIM-24MH+ frequency mixer from Mini-Circuits (Brooklyn,... — Mini-Circuits' Engineering Dept.  prev. page
[1]
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
next page 
|
|
Resources
Electronic Design