News

18 June 2009

 

RFMD launches broadband distributed amplifiers for up to 35GHz

RF Micro Devices Inc of Greensboro, NC, USA has launched five new distributed amplifiers for broadband, high-frequency applications. The new amplifiers deliver superior gain and output power (up to 35GHz) and are designed to support a wide array of high frequency commercial, military and space applications.

Based on GaAs pseudomorphic high-electron-mobility transistor (pHEMT) technology, the SDA-1000 through 5000 series of distributed amplifiers range in operating frequency from DC-20GHz to DC-35GHz and represent RFMD’s first amplifiers operating above 20GHz. Samples are available now, and product revenue is expected in the September quarter. Two follow-on amplifiers will extend the product family by delivering similar wideband high-frequency performance and noise figures but at increased operating frequency of up to 40 GHz and 50GHz.

The new family of distributed amplifiers has been designed specifically for high-frequency applications such as modulators, broadband test equipment, wideband gain blocks in military and space applications, and Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) laser drivers and clock drivers in fiber optics. “These new products deliver superior performance and provide a solid foundation for our broadband microwave amplifier product family,” says Jeff Shealy, general manager of RFMD's Defense and Power business unit.

“We are also developing products with higher sensitivity, linearity and multi-Watt power output exploiting advanced semiconductors like gallium nitride and indium phosphide,” says RFMD fellow Kevin Kobayashi. “Recently, we demonstrated as much as four times greater linearity and output power for GaN-based distributed amplifiers without compromising bandwidth or noise figure compared to our GaAs pHEMT products,” he adds. “These will be attractive solutions for emerging applications and systems such as software-reconfigurable radios and 100 Gigabit Ethernet.”

The performance of such GaN monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) was presented by Kobayashi at the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits symposium during last week’s IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium (IMS 2009) in Boston, MA, USA.

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