RF & Microwave Industry News

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CDMA RFIC Upconverters QUALCOMM Inc. San Diego, CA Few products are on a faster track than today’s digital wireless handsets. Currently, the industry is scrambling to meet the demand for these improved telephones. As a result, component manufacturers must generate new devices that enable the handset manufacturers to design...

Chip-size Package Technology for Semiconductors Chip-scale packaging (CSP) of IC devices is rapidly gaining acceptance worldwide because of intrinsic size advantages, the promise of highly favorable cost/performance trade-offs and reliance on existing materials and assembly infrastructures. The compliant, flex-circuit-based package is increasingly being viewed as the CSP method of...

Designing High Speed Paging Systems The area of pager systems is changing with the introduction of new paging standards, particularly FLEX, in all worldwide markets. The semiconductor concepts for new pagers are developing rapidly toward even higher integration. Single-chip concepts, including decoding, controller tasks, level shifting, frequency synthesizer and...

Behavior of GaAs FET Pulsed IV Characteristics The IV characteristics of GaAs MESFET devices acquired under a variety of pulsed conditions are compared. The results show that the differences between the static and pulsed characteristics are not due to thermal effects alone as is sometimes assumed. J. Rodriguez-Tellez University...

A Versatile Test Bench for Wireless RF/Microwave Component Characterization Recent advances in instrumentation, motivated by the volume and cost demands of the commercial wireless marketplace, allow a powerful RF/microwave test bench to be assembled at relatively low cost. A versatile test bench comprising a vector network analyzer (VNA), spectrum...

Multilayer Bonding and Fabrication Guidelines John Bushie Taconic ADD Petersburgh, NY Increased performance requirements, packaging size and cost reductions have placed a new pressure on the RF design engineer and PCB fabricator to develop new and innovative solutions. One of the recent approaches to achieving these objectives is combining...

Around the Circuit INDUSTRY NEWS Shareholders of Northrop Grumman Corp. have approved a merger pursuant to which the company will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Lockheed Martin Corp. Of the more than 54 million shares voted (representing approximately 80 percent of the total shares outstanding), more than 97...

COMPONENTS Wideband Switch The model 1604 wideband 16 input x four output monitoring switch features a 3 to 14.5 GHz bandwidth, which makes it versatile for monitoring RF signals in a wide range of applications. Insertion loss is 12 dB (max) and input-to-output isolation is 60 dB (min). Each...

SOFTWARE FPGA Programmer The Silicon Sculptor PC-based field-programmable gate array (FPGA) programmer is designed for programming the company’s devices from a desktop PC rather than in a lab. A single adapter module can be used to program all devices within a package type, regardless of pin count. In addition,...

MATERIALS Thick-film Gold Conductors The model QG150 high density, thick-film gold conductor composition is designed for interconnect applications that require ultra-fine-line resolution or superior performance at high frequency. The material features high conductivity, dense fired films, good edge definition to provide low loss at frequencies above 20 GHz, and...