Avago Technologies, a supplier of interface components for communications, industrial and consumer applications, announced two ultra-low noise, high gain, high linearity GaAs balanced low noise amplifiers for cellular infrastructure applications. Avago’s MGA-16516/17516, which are the latest additions to its family of economical, easy to use LNAs, helps to significantly improve the sensitivity and dynamic range of cellular infrastructure applications. Both LNAs feature a compact footprint and are designed to be used as first stage LNAs. Typical applications include cellular base station transceiver radio cards, tower mounted amplifiers, combiners, repeaters and remote/digital radio heads.

Avago’s MGA-16516/17516 LNAs are housed in a 4 mm by 4 mm by 0.85 mm surface-mount 16-lead QFN package, and were developed using Avago’s proprietary 0.25 μm GaAs enhancement-mode PHEMT process. The MGA-16516 operates from 500 to 1700 MHz, while the MGA-17516 operates from 1700 to 2700 MHz. These new LNAs will enable Avago to provide support for GSM, CDMA, UMTS and next generation LTE cellular bandwidths. The MGA-16516/17516 have been designed to be used with 3 dB hybrid couplers at the input and output of LNAs typically found in the front-end of cellular base stations, combiners and transceiver radio cards.

In a typical operating environment of 5 V and 50 mA per channel, the MGA-16516 delivers a 0.45 dB noise figure, 17.5 dB gain, 11.5 dBm input Third Order Intercept Point (IIP3), and 18 dBm output power at 1 dB compress point (P1dB) at 850 MHz. Under the same operating conditions, the MGA-17516 delivers enhanced performance of 0.52 dB noise figure, 17.2 dB gain, 13.7 dBm IIP3, and 21.5 dBm output power at P1dB at 1850 MHz.