Semiconductors / Integrated Circuits

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There is good news for those thinking about adding wireless communications to their industrial, scientific, or medical (ISM) application. A variety of low power, low cost radio ASSPs are available that can provide wireless features specifically for ISM applications. Fortunately, you do not need to be a communications specialist...

This article continues the trend of previous publications, 1,2 to simplify the prediction of RF performance of systems designed for wireless digital communications. The first shows the correlation between sidelobes and intermodulation (IM) products. Sidelobes are the result of the spectrum re-growth when a digitally modulated signal is applied...

The satisfaction that mobile phones can provide is highly dependent on their autonomy. Three factors can be easily identified which have a strong influence on autonomy: the power consumption of the mobile phone, the intensity of the electromagnetic field near the mobile and the battery capacity. The first of...

Generally, an oscillator can be seen as a positive feedback system. It usually consists of an amplifier followed by a resonator, which is fed back to the amplifier input, as shown in Figure 1 . The amplifier task is to compensate for the losses in the resonator, and the...

The simplest quarter-wavelength, multi-port power divider, known as a Wilkinson divider, 1-2 provides a match at all ports, low loss, in-phase power splitting and high isolation between output ports. Historically, this device was reported earlier. 3-7 It was also described 5 together with the so-called Gysel-type combiner, 8 based...

Modern communication systems often require narrow band filters presenting high selectivity and low insertion loss. When there are also stringent requirements on the overall dimensions of the filtering structure, it could become very problematic to select a suitable class of resonators having at the same time compactness and large...

Integrated voltage-controlled capacitors, usually known as varactors, are used in many electronic integrated devices for RF applications. 1 In particular, voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO) 2,3 and tuneable filters 4 are the two main applications. For good performance of integrated devices that have a varactor as a component, it is very...

In many applications, such as balanced power amplifiers, mixers and antenna systems, power dividers/combiners are required. Power dividers using quarter-wave lines become prohibitively large at the lower frequencies and result in MMIC chips of larger size and higher cost. The lumped-element approach, which uses lumped inductors and capacitors, is...

The basic principle of operation of a MESFET multiplier is that the device is biased for a particular conduction angle, based on the harmonic frequency to be generated. A generalized circuit schematic of a MESFET frequency multiplier is shown in Figure 1 . It can be seen that the...

One of the greatest challenges in characterizing new coaxial interfaces is to determine an accurate test configuration. When precision airlines are not available it is very difficult to obtain a true measurement of the device under test. It becomes necessary to design and implement calibration standards to eliminate the...