Avago Technologies has announced the availability of its MGA-635P8 ultra low-noise amplifier for base station (BTS) RF front-end design. The LNA can be used in a variety of cellular applications, such as the first stage of cellular base station transceiver radio cards, tower mounted amplifiers (TMA), combiners, repeaters and remote/digital radio heads.

The new MGA-635P8 LNA is a new addition to the company’s high linearity, ultra low-noise amplifier family series, which includes the previously released MGA-633P8 (450 MHz up to 1.5 GHz) and MGA-634P8 (1.5 GHz up to 2.3 GHz). With the addition of the 2,300 to 4,000 MHz MGA-635P8, Avago has a complete family of production ready LNAs ready for high volume GSM, TDS-CDMA and CDMA cellular infrastructure applications.

The wireless infrastructure industry must provide optimum coverage with the best signal quality in a crowded spectrum. Receiver sensitivity is the most critical requirement in a BTS receiver’s design. LNA selection, in particular the first-stage LNA, greatly affects the BTS receiver’s performance. Low noise figure is a key design goal. The MGA-635P8 has a best-in-class noise figure (NF) of 0.56 dB, 0.75 dB maximum, at 2,500 MHz.

Another key design factor is linearity, which affects the receiver’s ability to distinguish between closely spaced wanted and spurious signals. Output third-order intercept, OIP3, is used to specify linearity. At 2,500 MHz and operating from 5 V with a 56 mA bias current, the MGA-635P8 delivers an OIP3 performance of 35.9 dBm.

Also, with built-in active bias circuitry, the MGA-635P8 operating current is adjustable. This allows designers to make tradeoffs between operating current and output linearity while maintaining an optimum noise figure. The LNA is available in a compact 2.0 by 2.0 by 0.75 mm, 8-lead, surface-mount QFN package that is RoHS compliant and its operating temperature range is -25° to +85°C.