RF & Microwave Industry News

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News from Washington Joint Stars Full-rate Production Decision Called Premature and Risky In a recent report, the General Accounting Office (GAO) renewed its claim that the Air Force’s decision to go to full-scale production of the joint surveillance and target-attack radar system (Joint STARS) was ill advised and premature....

International Report France to Update Air Force Countermeasures Pod The French air force has awarded Dassault Electronique (DE) a contract covering the midlife updating of the DE Barax detector-jammer pods the service uses to equip its fleet of Mirage F.1 combat aircraft. Also known by the export designation PAJ-95,...

Commercial Market New Silicon/GaAs MMIC Report to be Released In a report about to be published, Allied Business Intelligence Inc. anticipates a breakthrough in the quest for the universal mobile phone made possible by the introduction of the dual-mode/band power amplification MMIC, which will allow users to operate a...

Book End Communications Standard Dictionary Martin H. Weik Chapman & Hall 1192 pages; $81.95 So many changes have occurred recently in the communications area that it is difficult to keep up with the terminology, much less the technology. Much time is spent defining terms and deciphering acronyms that were...

Surface-mount Coaxial Connectors In today’s fast-paced environment of high density electronic equipment, surface-mount connectors are becoming an important part of the integration process. Most RF components are assembled onto surface-mount PCBs or into hybrid modules. The RF connector interface has been one of the more difficult areas to reduce...

A CMOS Fractional-N PLL IC at Microwave Frequencies Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. San Diego, CA Designers of modern microwave terminal systems are faced with a global competitive market that is leading to a greater emphasis on power efficiency, size and cost. Component vendors must respond to these needs with not...

An IC Characterization and Analysis Program Update Version 5.0 of the HP Integrated Circuit Characterization and Analysis Program (IC-CAP) has been developed and is available currently. This update to the popular device modeling program features a new statistics module to help process engineers and circuit designers improve yields and...

Low Noise Cellular Receiver Amplifiers Low noise and high dynamic range are the keys to success for cellular base station receiver front-end amplifiers. Lower noise means slightly longer range and high dynamic range translates to less intermodulation interference from strong adjacent-channel signals. Three new low noise receiver amplifiers have...

The Application of Low Noise, X-band Synthesizers to QAM Digital Radios Mark R. Simpson and John M. Dixon VertiCom Inc. Santa Rosa, CA For high data rate, 16-to-64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) designs, the vast majority of wireless point-to-point and point-to-multipoint radio manufacturers currently are using fixed-frequency, mechanically adjustable dielectric...

New Microstrip Bandpass Filter Topologies Marinus (Ron) Korber, Jr. Watkins-Johnson Co. Microwave miniature receivers require numerous microstrip filters for such functions as picket selection, preselection in the case of a receiver front end, and suppression of mixer spurious products and doubler fundamental frequency feedthrough. The sheer quantity of filters...