ISSUE DATE: FEBRUARY   OPTIONS
Integrated Circuits

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February - In This Issue

[Cover Story]
Gore Celebrates 50 Years Of PTFE
Most RF/microwave engineers know it by the acronym PTFE rather than the full name of polytetrafluoroethylene. The polymer is ever-present in the high-frequency industry in coaxial and fiber-optic cables, printed-circuitboard (PCB) materials, and electromagnetic-interference (EMI) shielding materials and gaskets. It is also the basis for innovative products in other industries, ranging from energy to medicine. The company behind the many applications for PTFE is W. L....  — Jack Browne

[News]
RF Semiconductors Take A Variety Of Forms
At the roots of almost all of today’s electronic devices lie semiconductors. These integrated circuits (ICs) stem from a variety of semiconductor technologies, which have evolved to satisfy requirements like lower power, less noise, more broadband coverage, or simply the need to squeeze higher integration into smaller, cheaper packages. In reaction to these trends, high-frequency engineers have found new ways to leverage gallium arsenide (GaAs), gallium nitride ...  — Nancy Friedrich

[News]
Amplifiers Apply Gain To Diverse Applications
High-frequency amplifiers are abundant in type and application, being used for everything from setting the noise figure of communications receivers to driving high-power signals to transmitter antennas. Types include broadband and narrowband power amplifiers, low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), logarithmic amplifiers (logamps), operational amplifiers (opamps), transimpedance amplifiers (TIAs), and voltage-variable amplifiers in configurations ranging from...  — Jack Browne

[Design Features]
RF Power Calibration Aids Wireless Transmitters
Wireless transmitters can benefit from measurement and control of RF power. Because of such factors as regulatory requirements and the need to co-exist with other wireless networks, the RF power levels of wireless transmitter high-power amplifiers (HPAs) must be monitored and controlled. The precision and accuracy of these measurements can result in improved transmitter spectral performance as well as significant savings in operating cost for an...  — Eamon Nash

[Design Features]
GaN Devices Arm Distributed Amplifier
Broadband, high-efficiency power amplifiers serve a wide range of military applications in present and future communications and navigation systems. But amplifier designers are limited in performance by the active devices available to them. Fortunately, the growing availability of wide-bandgap semiconductor devices, such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) transistors, is clearing the way for broadband, high-efficiency power amplifiers...  — Anthony Pavio , et al.

[Design Features]
Assemble High-Power Attenuator Systems
High-power signal processing and testing requires the use of highfrequency attenuators designed to handle large signals without damage or performance degradation. Especially when working with signals exceeding 1 kW, as common in commercial broadcast and military radar systems, reliable attenuators are critical to any test system. Most attenuators on the market rely on thick or thin film resistive designs screen printed or deposited on a flat...  — Dave Distler

[Product Technology]
Converter Eases Multiport Testing From 75 To 110 GHz
Characterizing multiport devices with a vector network analyzer (VNA) in the 75-to-110-GHz range has always been performed using an external frequency converter that increases the usable frequency range of the VNA. Such converters are invariably offered as options by VNA manufacturers and, while they generally offer adequate frequency coverage through millimeter-wave frequencies, are often limited in terms of test signal power and dynamic range....  — Yassen Mikhailov

[Product Technology]
Waveguide Diplexer Extends To E-Band
High-data-rate communications require generous amounts of bandwidth, a valuable commodity with the growing number of spectral users for wireless applications. Several years ago, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) designated previously unused bands of 71 to 76 GHz, 81 to 86 GHz, and 92 to 95 GHz as available for gigabit-speed wireless communications links. Of course, developing practical wireless links at these E-band...  — Jack Browne

[Product Technology]
Real-Time Spectrum Analyzers Capture 8 GHz
Wireless technology is acquiring a digital nature, due to the increasing use of digital modulation formats as a way to increase spectral efficiency. Traditional test instruments served as excellent tools for analyzing analog transmissions. But with the growing number of digitally modulated wireless signals, different measurement tools are needed. Tektronix (www.tek.com) has offered its RSA3000B series of...  — Jack Browne

[Editorial]
Prepare For The Worst, But Expect The Best
With the bubble bursting in the home market, talk of a recession is everywhere. Remembering the telecom burst of the not-too-distant past, it is easy for people in the microwaves industry to get concerned. During that downturn, microwave companies did suffer tough losses of both profits and personnel. Yet few were wounded deeply enough to not be able to perform well in their areas of expertise. By concentrating on their strengths and focusing on relationships with ...  — Nancy Friedrich

[Feedback]
Feedback
Misleading Survey Results SURVEYS SOMETIMES CREATE false impressions, and this was the case with an online survey recently conducted on the Microwaves & RF website and reported in this column in the December 2007 issue. The Quick Poll, which concluded last Nov. 28, asked the question, “Is the acquisition of American Technical Ceramics by AVX a good thing?” concerning the merging to two key RF/microwave-industry component ...  — Various Readers

[The Front End]
US WiMAX Adoption Still Faces Many Hurdles
MONTREAL, CANADA AND MIAMI, FLORIDA— Short-term opportunities with broadband wireless access (BWA)/WiMAX will most likely benefit licensed and unlicensed Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs), according to a new report from Maravedis (www.maravedis-bwa.com). According to the first edition of “Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless and WiMAX in the USA,” such short-term opportunities will...  — Nancy Friedrich

[The Front End]
Kudos
SANTA CLARA, CA AND MALAGA, SPAIN—Agilent Technologies (www.agilent.com) and ETS-Lindgren (www.ets-lindgren.com) have been selected by AT4 wireless labs (www.at4wireless.com) to provide WiMAX test equipment for use in radiated performance testing (RPT). As the WiMAX Forum Lead Lab and first worldwide WiMAX...  — Nancy Friedrich

[The Front End]
China's National ID Card Drove RFID Growth In 2007
Drove RFID Growth In 2007 In round figures, the value of the radio-frequencyidentification (RFID) market grew strongly to $5 billion in 2007. This growth was mainly powered by a peak in deliveries of the Chinese national ID card. About $2 billion of cards and infrastructure were delivered by Chinese suppliers, making China the biggest RFID market. Through 2007, however, the US retained its lead in number of RFID projects. But China leapt from number five to number...  — Nancy Friedrich

[The Front End]
CAE Firm Celebrates 20th Anniversary
MARLBOROUGH, MA—This year, Flomerics (www.flomerics.com) celebrates its 20th anniversary as an independent company. According to the company’s founder, Dr. David Tatchell, this landmark is a testimony to the company’s high-integrity, people-oriented culture and its core concept of delivering engineering simulation software for use by designers and engineers rather than just full-time analysts and specialists. Flomerics ...  — Nancy Friedrich

[Financial News]
QUALCOMM Releases First-Quarter Results
QUALCOMM, Inc. has announced results for the first fiscal quarter of 2008, which ended Dec. 30, 2007. According to the company, revenue was $2.44 billion—up 21 percent year over year and 6 percent sequentially. Net income was $767 million—up 18 percent year over year and down 32 percent sequentially. The sequential decrease in net income and diluted earnings per share for total QUALCOMM (GAAP) is due to a $331 million tax benefit recorded in the fourth ...  — Dawn Hightower

[Company News]
Company News
CONTRACTS Loral Space & Communications—Announced that its subsidiary, Space Systems/Loral, was selected to provide a high-capacity broadband satellite for ViaSat, Inc. ViaSat-1 is expected to be the world’s highest-capacity broadband satellite. The satellite is planned for Telesat’s 115 West longitude orbital slot. The new spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2011 and is expected to provide more than 15 years of service life. It...  — Nancy Friedrich

[People]
People
Cookson Electronics Elevates Paul Lotosky Cookson Electronics has named Paul Lotosky global director-customer technical support. He will lead the coordination of the ALPHA(R) global customer technical support efforts as they relate to optimizing support for ALPHA(R customers and for the sales and new product development efforts. Cookson has 30 years of experience and understanding of ...  — Dawn Hightower

[Educational Meetings]
Agenda
SHORT COURSES Besser Associates Short Courses RF CMOS Design February 25-26 (San Diego, CA) Applied RF Techniques I February 25-29 (San Diego, CA) May 12-16 (Burlington, MA) RF and High Speed PC Board Design Fundamentals February 27-29 (San Diego, CA) Designing High Efficiency RF Power Amplifiers February 27-29 (San Diego, CA) Mobile Broadband Wireless...  — Nancy Friedrich

[R&D Roundup]
40-Gb/s Amplifiers Achieve 3-dB Bandwidth With High Gain
MOST 40-Gb/s AMPLIFIERS suffer from limited gain, as the gain is often sacrificed for adequate bandwidth in high-speed operations. To conquer these design limitations, a circuit structure for broadband amplifiers has been proposed by Jun-Chau Chien and Liang-Hung Lu from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Graduate Institute of Electronics Engineering, National Taiwan University, Taipei. In this new architecture, the gain cells in the conventional ...  — Nancy Friedrich

[R&D Roundup]
Horn Antenna Aids Ground-Penetrating Radar
TO SATISFY THE NEEDS FOR BOTH low and high frequencies in ground-penetrating radar (GPR), an Ultra Wideband (UWB) GPR that transmits a short-time pulse signal is often used. To ensure that its performance is sufficient, Ahmet Serdar Turk and Hakkl Nazli from the Scientific and Technical Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) have developed a hyper-wideband horn-array design. It is essentially an array combination of partial-dielectric transverse electromagnetic ...  — Nancy Friedrich

[R&D Roundup]
DC-To-50-GHz LTCC Package Suits MM-Wave MMICs
SURFACE-MOUNT monolithic-microwave-integrated- circuit (MMIC) packages must contain high-performance vertical transitions. Usually, such a transition will use viaholes, which act as an inductance and generates a discontinuity. In contrast, Inkwon Ju, In-Bok Yom, and Seung-Hyeub Oh from ETRI’s Satellite Communications RF Technology team have proposed a vertical transition that utilizes a trough line, slab line, and shielded multilayer coplanar waveguides (SMCPWs)....  — Nancy Friedrich

[Application Notes]
Adaptive Amplifier/Antenna/Cell Combinations Generate 10 To 200 V/m
With today’s strict design requirements, engineers are forced to closely scrutinize data sheets. To help them take those specifications further, a series of application notes shows how amplifier/ antenna/cell combinations can generate 10 V/m, 20 V/m, 50 V/m, 100 V/m, or 200 V/m continuous wave (CW) or pulse modulated as well as with 80 percent amplitude modulation (AM) for radiated immunity testing. From 10 kHz to 40 GHz, such generation is done inside a...  — Nancy Friedrich

[Application Notes]
Development Guide Helps Engineers Build Better Test Systems
Test engineers are under constant pressure to maximize performance and flexibility while minimizing cost and complexity. By providing practical advice and real-world examples, Agilent Technologies, Inc. hopes to help them achieve that goal in its 200-page, full-color, downloadable guidebook titled, “Test System Development Guide.” The guide is broken down into four sections: Test System Design, Networking Choices, LXI: The Future of Test, and RF/Microwave Test...  — Nancy Friedrich

[Editor's Choice]
Amplifiers Span 20 To 4000 MHz
To satisfy applications ranging from point-topoint and multipoint radios to military jammers, an amplifier line boasts noise figures down to 0.9 dB. The QBH-8900 series amplifiers are available in frequencies from 20 to 4000 MHz. Second-intercept-point values range up to +75 dBm while intercepts reach +45 dBm. The QBH-8900 series from 10 to 28 dB. In addition to a lightweight, low-cost, package, no external circuitry is needed. The amplifiers, which feature internal blocking...  — Nancy Friedrich

[Editor's Choice]
Synthesizer Switches In Under 1 µs
Thanks to its fast switching speeds, a frequency synthesizer can be used as a narrow to wideband signal source as well as a programmed test source for digital radio, satcom, radar, and other communications equipment. The MBS-3300 narrowband programmed test source flaunts switching speeds of less than 1 µs and less than 1 µs delay. Custom bands up to 6600 MHz and step sizes down to 1 kHz also are available. The synthesizer offers low power consumption and low phase-noise...  — Nancy Friedrich

[Editor's Choice]
Amplifiers Boast Variable Output Impedance
An increasing amount of low- to mid-frequency RF applications are now being characterized by impedances other than 50 O. This trend led to the A3 amplifier family, which features an internal impedance transformer with selectable output impedance values of 12.5, 25, 50, 100, 200, and 400 O. The A3 family includes three self-contained, air-cooled, broadband solid-state amplifiers. The model 800A3 is designed for applications that require instantaneous bandwidth and high gain....  — Nancy Friedrich

[Editor's Choice]
Probe Station Reliably Handles 300-mm Wafers
At 45 nm and below, testing geometries must confront many problems related to wafer-level measurements. Front-end processes and equipment must be upgraded to handle new process materials, lower operating voltages, and increasingly complex integrated-circuit (IC) designs. A major investment also must be made at the back end in order for more advanced probing stations to handle low-noise environments, small pad probing, wide-range temperature testing, internal node probing, and multi-site...  — Nancy Friedrich