News

17 February 2009

 

Skyworks launches LTE power amplifiers and front-end modules

At this week’s 2009 GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Skyworks Solutions Inc of Woburn, MA, USA has announced sample availability of what it claims is the industry’s broadest family of power amplifiers (PA) and front-end modules (FEM) for long-term evolution (LTE) applications.

LTE has emerged as the dominant 4G standard with all major handset OEMs, infrastructure suppliers, and operators worldwide. According to Strategy Analytics, the LTE handset market alone is expected to reach 150 million units by 2013.

Skyworks’ multi-band and multi-mode family of products, which now includes two new PA modules and four new FEMs, supports 13 frequency bands - the largest across the industry, it is claimed - and provides a flexible set of options for manufacturers developing and building 4G-enabled handsets, infrastructure base-stations, wireless PC cards, and other embedded solutions. The portfolio includes what are said to be the industry’s first PA modules supporting LTE-FDD for the USA (the SKY77449 and SKY77453) and LTE-TDD for China (the SKY77441), and the industry’s first LTE front-end module for band VII.

The SKY77455, SKY77456, SKY77457 and SKY77458 (compact front-end modules that support bands I, IV/X, V/VI and VIII, respectively) are fully matched and completely compliant for LTE, as well as HSDPA and WCDMA standards. These FEMs integrate the PA, inter-stage filter, input/output matching, power detection, and duplexer functionality in a small 4mm x 7mm form factor.

The SKY77449 for bands XIII and XIV and the SKY77453 for bands XII and XVII are both fully matched PA modules developed for 4G LTE/EUTRAN standards. They integrate all active RF circuitry (including the input, inter-stage and output matching circuits and power detector functionality) within a single 4mm x 4mm x 0.85 mm low-profile package.

Using Skyworks’ indium gallium phosphide (InGaP) bipolar field-effect transistor (BiFET) design, which provides bias and detection architecture implementation, the new product family also supports low operating voltage down to 3V with high power-added efficiency (PAE). The portfolio also delivers high linear power under quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK), 16 quadrature amplitude modulations (QAM), and wideband code division multiple access (WCDMA) modulation, with up to 20MHz in bandwidth and partial or full resource block allocation.

The SKY77445 PA module for band VII and the SKY77441 FEM for bands 38 and 40 were introduced in 2008 and complete the newly expanded LTE product family.

Volume production of all new devices is scheduled to begin this year.

See related item:

Skyworks unveils smallest WCDMA power amplifiers with integrated directional couplers

Search: Skyworks FEMs InGaP BiFET

Visit: www.skyworksinc.com