Anaren Inc. announced that it has officially launched its Xinger®l-III brand line of 3 dB hybrid and directional couplers for wireless infrastructure applications. At ¼ the size of the company's previous generation parts (Xinger-II components remain popular and in production), the design and unique manufacturing processes behind the new Xinger-III offer the same power handling, among other advantages.

"As competitors try to catch up with our last gen part, we've already reinvented and surpassed it for new gains in performance and what is, frankly, a startling footprint improvement," said General Manager for Anaren's Wireless Group, Hans Peter Ostergaard. "We're offering this part as an option to our customers who want such advances now to keep pace with their next-generation base station equipment designs - not as a part they must migrate to from our still successful previous Xinger models."

Emphasizing that the new components feature patent-pending design and materials advances, Ostergaard says that the new Xinger-III line's tiny footprint and robust power-handling capability make it a viable alternative to ceramic equivalents without the risk of cracked solder joints that ceramics can create when their thermal expansion characteristics don't match the PCB to which they are mounted. Because Anaren's new parts are softboard, the co-efficient of thermal expansion (CTE) disparity doesn't exist, liberating designers to specify ordinary PCBs without having to worry about CTE mismatch.

"The small 0.25 x 0.2 and 0.56 x 0.2 footprints for this line are also standardized from previous Xinger-brand component generations," added Ostergaard. "Which is increasingly a requisite for OEMs in the wireless infrastructure space, who are trying to standardize the equipment they deploy around the world as a cost-control measure."