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ISSUE DATE: JANUARY 2005 | |
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January 2005 - In This Issue [Cover Story] Laser-Based System Speeds PCB Prototypes Microwave printed-circuit board (PCB) prototypes can be quickly and cost-effectively produced in-house by means of any number of commercial mechanical milling machines or chemical etching. A faster and more accurate approach, however, is to perform the etching and machining by laser. That is the approach used in the new ProtoLaser 100 system from LPKF Laser & Electronics (Wilsonville, OR), which can mill and drill both laminated ceramic materials and soft substrate materials such as... — Stephan Schmidt [News] IC Suppliers Support Growing WLAN Arena Wireless local-area networks (WLANs) have grown into one of the largest business segments in wireless electronics. According to the 225-page report, "WLAN: Wireless Data's Silver Bullet," from Forward Concepts (Tempe, AZ), more than 160 million WLAN chips will be sold by the end of 2005, with the market for WLAN network interface cards approaching $9 billion by the end of this year. These numbers indicate healthy opportunities for suppliers of WLAN integrated circuits (ICs) for many years... — Jack Browne [Design Features] Compare Analyzers And Meters For Power Tests Power meters are often considered for mobile-telephone production testing, because they can quickly measure peak power, average power, and peak-to-average ratio. But an RF power meter has certain deficiencies that hinder accurate wireless handset testing. For example, an RF power meter cannot identify where in the frequency spectrum a device is transmitting its power. Because of this, a handset may pass a power test with a power meter, but transmit at the wrong frequency or suffer... — Robert Green , et al. [Design Features] Achieving High Gain Over Broad Bandwidths Transistor gain (S21) usually falls off with frequency. To create an amplifier with fairly constant gain over a broad bandwidth, otherwise known as a broadband amplifier, the transistor's input and output circuits must be arranged to favor the high end of the band and, possibly, to increase the mismatch at the low end of the band. Part seven of this eight-part series on transistor amplifier design will examine what needs to be done to achieve high gain over broad bandwidths.... — Joseph F. White [Product Technology] Top Products Of 2004 Sound business practices include aggressive introduction of new products even during lean times. Even through a difficult year for high-frequency-electronics business in 2004, smart companies continued to support strong research-and-development efforts and rollout innovative new products in the hopes of capturing new markets or increasing market share. The list for Microwaves & RF's Top Products of 2004 is at best a representative sampling of the many innovative products... — Jack Browne [Product Technology] Digital Oscilloscopes Capture 250 MSamples/s Engineers and technicians may differ on the effectiveness of a circuit layout, but most will agree that a digital oscilloscope is one of the most useful tools for testing and troubleshooting that circuit. And the 6810 series of digital oscilloscopes from Protek Test & Measurement (Allendale, NJ) represent one of the better combinations of price and performance for this class of instrument, with 250-MSamples/s real-time sampling rate and 8-b vertical resolution. The 6810 series... — Roy Taffaro [Editorial] Designing For Changing Markets Design engineers have grown accustomed to dealing with variables. Many engineers (still alive to tell the tale) may remember small programs developed for Texas Instruments or Hewlett-Packard calculators that would assist in the design process. These forerunners of modern computer-based design programs depended upon the engineer entering different values for a number of variables in order to calculate, for example, the required circuit-element values for a filter's resonant circuit.... — Jack Browne |
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