RF & Microwave Industry News

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RF identification (better known by the acronym RFID), while not a new technology, has experienced a recent resurgence due to new applications in the supply chain management, coupled with advances in the technology. The identification of an object using RF interrogation has been in use almost as long as...

A new class of microstrip surface-mountable harmonic (low pass) filters constructed using thick film technology has been developed at IMS Inc. They are designed for use wherever suppression of harmonics or other spurious signals generated by transmitters operating in a host of different RF applications is required. Such applications...

A spiral is a very important form of planar or multilayer inductor or transformer. Previous designs of spiral components, however, have relied heavily on approximate quasi-static models and verification using electromagnetic field solvers. Recently, an application-specific graphical user interface has been created for use with the IE3D high performance...

Cellular radio systems such as GSM Edge, N-CDMA or W-CDMA are seeing increasing demand in today’s wireless infrastructure. As volume production increases, equipment manufacturers require low cost solutions with good performance from their component suppliers. Freescale Semiconductor has pioneered the use of high power plastic packages for high frequency...

Wideband Darlington gain blocks have become a workhorse for RF wireless and wireline applications. The broadband linearity and direct-coupled performance has found a multitude of commercial design-ins for base station pre-drivers, repeater-pole transceivers, fiber optic transceivers, CATV and instrumentation systems. One of the drawbacks of existing Darlington amplifier solutions,...

Two new surface-mount I-Q modulators/demodulators have been added to the “RFID by M/A-COM” series of products that are designed for RFID, wireless handset and base station applications. The MA4IQP900L-1291T and the MA4IQP900H-1291T HMIC I-Q modulators/demodulators are compact and highly functional devices using low and high barrier silicon Schottky diodes,...

A series of wideband 50 ? coaxial test cables has been introduced that feature extra rugged construction with integrated strain relief for longer life. The CBL-series Coaxial-Flex test cables are designed for use from DC to 18 GHz and are useful over a temperature range of –55° to +105°C....

Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) enables a variety of applications ranging from high bandwidth backhaul for data networks to simple wireless DSL for residential customers. Although this is a large and diverse market, most of these wireless systems are implemented using proprietary or vendor specific technologies. There is almost no...

Mobile communication systems currently use multi-carrier/multi-channel schemes for effective use of the frequency spectrum resources. The intermodulation has a serious impact on these communication systems in terms of adjacent channel interference, resulting in an increase of bit error rates. As the power amplifier operates close to the saturation region...

There has been a widespread trend toward higher levels of integration in microwave and millimeter-wave system design, motivated by a desire to reduce cost, size and complexity, particularly as many old applications are being re-invented in array architectures. The most commonly used format for achieving high levels of integration...