Freescale Semiconductor announced the new Airfast RF power solutions designed to supply the world's wireless infrastructure equipment manufacturers with RF power products that take performance and energy efficiency to new levels.
The Airfast portfolio is the next generation of Freescale's RF LDMOS products engineered to deliver significant performance improvements by implementing a comprehensive range of technologies that provide power density, signal bandwidth, cost effectiveness and linear efficiency/gain. Airfast RF power solutions are expected to deliver the industry's widest bandwidth products, and are intended to support signals in excess of 150 MHz instantaneous bandwidth and enable simultaneous operation over multiple communication bands. Designed to provide an impressive five points higher device efficiency than the latest generation LDMOS products available in the industry, Freescale's RF power devices significantly improve linearity and anticipate 25 percent higher power density.
"In the past, success in RF power was all about linear efficiency," said Tom Deitrich, Senior Vce President and General Manager of Freescale's RF, Analog & Sensor Group. "Today our customers have a far more complicated set of challenges: multiple standards, signal variability, extreme bandwidth requirements and more. Freescale is addressing this paradigm shift with a new product family based on a more comprehensive, holistic and system-level approach to RF power technology."
Through a combination of innovative technologies and system-level platforms, Airfast RF power solutions go beyond linear efficiency and performance to address a host of customer needs such as ease of use and flexibility.
According to ABI Research, Freescale is the leading supplier of RF power solutions with 57 percent market share, far ahead of its closest competitor. Freescale's Airfast RF power solutions are designed to reinforce and extend this market share lead through extensive investment and innovation for the benefit of the world's top wireless infrastructure equipment OEMs. Freescale led the industry in delivering cost-effective, LDMOS plastic packaging and multi-stage integration, and company has demonstrated its continued leadership with the industry's broadest portfolio that continues to advance performance while reducing cost and design time.
Airfast RF power solutions are designed to help customers address increasingly challenging market requirements. The global wireless network market is changing rapidly due in large part to an explosion in the rate of mobile broadband adoption. According to analyst firm Infonetics Research, the number of mobile broadband subscribers is projected to grow from 558 million subscribers in 2010 to more than 2 billion subscribers in 2015. This dynamic is placing tremendous strain on cellular networks that have already seen rapid expansion of frequencies and modulation formats, and an increase in signal bandwidth and peak power requirements to keep pace with data demand. Based on these trends, the industry is moving toward multi-band base station equipment to eliminate redundancy and an increase in macro base station power to support the constant push for additional signal bandwidth and higher efficiency.
Airfast RF power solutions will be housed in Freescale's next generation over molded plastic packaging that is expected to offer up to a 20 percent reduction in thermal resistance over the first generation, continuing Freescale's commitment to utilizing highly advanced and cost-effective packaging for high-performance RF power transistor applications.
