RF enables "mobile living room"
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 6/13/2006 4:55:00 AM
International Microwave Show, participants and exhibitors highlighted RF components and test products that will point the way to the "mobile living room." Vendors of test and test-related products included Cascade Microtech, which highlighted its M150 DC-to-220-GHz measurement platform, and WL Gore, which exhibited its Phaseflex 110-GHz test assemblies.
Speakers at the event represented chip makers Freescale and Peregrine Semiconductor, and it was Jim Cable, Peregrine CEO, who used the "mobile living room" phrase in his address concluding event, produced by Interact Global, primarily to provide outreach to journalists working for publications based in Asia. The mobile living room, Cable said, is enabled by portable devices that enable you to carry with you all the comforts of home: your phone, audio and video programming, a camera, television, and games, for example. Enabling such mobile devices, he contended, will be products such as his firm's CMOS SOCs.Peregrine used the event to debut its RoHS-compliant PE42742 75-ohm single-pole, double-throw RF switch for broadband applications as well as its RoHS-compliant PE42555 50-ohm single-pole, double-throw device, which operates from dc to 6.0 GHz.
Another speaker, Jim Norling, marketing director at Freescale, described how his firm will use newly developed high-voltage RF power technology combined with low-cost over-molded plastic packaging to expand into the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) market. Freescale, he said, is extending its technology and packaging into the ISM market with transistors designed for both the HF/VHF frequency space (10 to 450 MHz) and the 2.45-GHz ISM band.
He noted that the expansion was spawned by the development of Freescale’s 50-V VHV6 RF LDMOS technology (very high voltage sixth-generation RF laterally diffused metal oxide semiconductor), a 50-V enhancement to Freescale’s 28-V LDMOS technology.
The flagship of Freescale's ISM product offering is the MRF6V2300NB, a 300-W, 50-V LDMOS transistor with a frequency of operation up to 450 MHz and manufactured in a TO-272-WB-4 over-molded plastic package. This device can produce 27-dB of gain at an efficiency of 68 percent.
