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February 2011 Prevent PCB Problems In ISM-Band Designs Designing circuits for low-cost products at Industrial-Scientific-Medical (ISM) band frequencies has been greatly simplified by the availability of reliable integrated circuits (ICs) that provide many of the transceiver functions. But even the best ICs can be undone by flawed printed-circuit boards (PCBs), although most PCB problems can be avoided by careful design and planning. What follows is a roadmap to guide designers past PCB design oversights, with strategies... — Martin Stoehr February 2011 Perusing Package Options For ICs Make it smaller. Tat customer request (or demand) can be heard by designers of integrated circuits (ICs) in application areas ranging from automotive to space. Product developers want IC functions that can fit in smaller packages and modules— and they want them to be lighter in weight and lower in cost, to boot. Obviously, not all of these goals are easy to meet simultaneously, but the packaging side of RF and microwave ICs has come a long way in... — Jack Browne December 2010 International Project Targets Advances In Power Semiconductors CATANIA, ITALY: A 42-month European research project called LAST POWER (Large Area silicon carbide Substrates and heTeroepitaxial GaN for POWER device applications) is tasked with advancing wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductor technology. The project, which is under the domain of the European Nanoelectronics Initiative Advisory Council (ENIAC), will focus on the complete production chain for siliconcarbide (SiC) and gallium-nitride-on-silicon ... — Paul Whytock December 2010 Imaging Chipset Uses 140-GHz Atmospheric Window Every physical body produces natural emissions, which may be detected and used for imaging applications. For passive millimeter-wave imaging applications, it is ideal to use broadband millimeterwave receivers that function within atmospheric windows. A heterodyne receiver chipset using the 140-GHz atmospheric window has been presented by Stefan Koch and Shin Saito from Sony Deutschland GmbH together with Marc Guthoerl from Thermo Fisher Scientific, Ingmar ... — Nancy Friedrich November 2010 Seeking Faster Devices At IEDM Advances in semiconductor device technologies account for a large part of the growth in electronics. And there is no single event that summarizes the state of the electronic device art quite like the annual IEEE International Electronic Devices Meeting. Scheduled for December 6-8, 2010 at the Hilton San Francisco Union Square, the 2010 IEDM offers a variety of new developments in device and modeling... — Jack Browne November 2010 Satcom Transceiver Delivers Linear 13 W Frequency upconverter/downconverter subsystems designed for satellite communications (satcom) terminals tend to be larger than the ever-shrinking units for terrestrial consumer wireless systems. Ruggedized equipment for military satcom systems is larger still. However, as demonstrated by the model 81000 satcom transceiver subsystem from Narda Microwave-East, innovative approaches to design and fabrication can... — Erica Aycin November 2010 Project Targets Heterogeneous SoC Solutions EUROPE-A three-year European project dubbed DOTFIVE is focusing on the RTD activities necessary to move the silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunction-bipolar-transistor (HBT) into the frequency range of 0.5 THz (500 GHz) at room temperature. Using those HBTs, it should be possible to evaluate the achievable performance of millimeter-wave integrated circuits (ICs). The transistors developed within DOTFIVE will be used for designing circuits that enable ... — Dawn Hightower November 2010 Terahertz CMOS ICs Become Feasible Silicon technology now offers a path to both capable and economical systems operating at 200 GHz and beyond. This option has arisen because of recent progress in complementary-metaloxide- semiconductor (CMOS) integrated circuits and silicon-germanium (SiGe) heterojunctionbipolar- transistor (HBT) technology. Underscoring this shift is the recent demonstration of the following: a 140-GHz fundamental-mode voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) in 90-nm CMOS; a... — Nancy Friedrich October 2010 ICs Control Gain In Wireless Networks CAPACITY AND BANDWIDTH EFFICIENCY IN CURRENT AND EMERGING wireless communications formats such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems are driving the design of smaller base stations with multiple-carrier capabilities. The complex architectures in these systems, such as the use of multiple-input, multipleoutput (MIMO) antenna schemes, require even greater levels of integration in both base stations and handsets. Since many of these systems require variable gain control, which... — Phillip Halford , et al. September 2010 Defense Electronics Supplement FPGA Reconfigures Space-Based Systems Space is the final frontier, but it is a harsh one, requiring components capable of withstanding large levels of radiation. For complex processing in satellites and other spacebased systems, designers have been restricted to custom and expensive application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). But the introduction of the off-the-shelf Virtex-5QV fieldprogrammable gate array (FPGA) from Xilinx provides ... — Jack Browne August 2010 Single-Chip Bluetooth Platform The Bluetooth platform developed by CSR is a single-mode, single-chip low-energy platform. Low-energy Bluetooth systems are important to the wireless communications sector for applications like remote controls, health and well-being devices, computer interface devices, automotive RKE functionality, smart-energy appliances, and proximity tagging. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has already adopted the Bluetooth v4.0 specification. In fact, CSR has qualified ... — Paul Whytock August 2010 Front-End Module Serves 900-MHz ISM Band WITH ADVANCED METERING INFRASTRUCTURE (AMI) and other applications in the Industrial, Scientific, and Medical (ISM) band gaining in popularity, the RF3858 front-end module is a promising solution for portable equipment in need of size reduction. It also reduces the number of components outside of the core chipset. The RF3858 contains a power amplifier (PA) transmit/receive (Tx/Rx) transfer switch, low-noise amplifier (LNA) with bypass mode, and matching components. That LNA... — Nancy Friedrich July 2010 Transceiver IC Tackles 3G, LTE Mobile handsets must pack a great deal of functionality within a compact package to even approach modern customers’ expectations. In order to handle different bands and operating modes, RF front-end modules (FEMs) typically employ low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) and filters for each receiver band, and power amplifiers (PAs) and filters for each transmit band. But Fujitsu Microelectronics America has... — Jack Browne July 2010 DDS RFIC Performs Direct Digital Modulation With the increasing availability of ultra-highspeed digital-to-analog converters (DACs), a direct digital synthesizer (DDS) can generate waveforms exceeding 1 GHz. Until now, however, no higheroutput DDSs have been able to provide the desired modulation capabilities. Now, what is thought to be the first DDS RFIC with greater than 1 GHz output and direct digital FM and PM capabilities has been presented by Xueyang Geng, Fa Foster Dai, J. David Irwin, and Richard C.... — Nancy Friedrich June 2010 NXP Commits To SiGe Roadmap As Sales Of ICODE Chips Hit A Billion Eindhoven, Netherlands: By the end of this year, NXP Semiconductors plans to release 50 different products based on its new silicon germanium: carbide (SiGe:C) process technology. The process, dubbed QUBiC4, is designed to meet the needs of high-frequency applications in the wireless, broadband communications, networking, and multimedia markets. An advantage of the SiGe:C QUBiC4 process is that it allows manufacturers of wireless systems to add more... — Paul Whytock June 2010 One Billion Devices AMONG THESE ACHIEVEMENTS, NXP also is celebrating a production milestone with its ICODE chip. Recently, the company shipped its one-billionth component. In an effort to maintain this device’s success, NXP has launched the ICODE SLIx platform (Figure 1). This platform offers enhanced flexibility and 100-percent backward compatibility with existing solutions. ICODE SLIx vows to ... — Paul Whytock May 2010 MMICs Serve Key Transceiver Functions Monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) based on gal l ium arsenide (GaAs) have been a part of this industry for a quarter century. And Freescale Semiconductor, the former Motorola Semiconductor, has enjoyed a long history of product development in analog and digital integrated circuits (ICs) and high-power RF transistors. But, although the firm has not lacked for the technological ... — Monte Miller , et al. May 2010 Healthcare Segment Offers Plentiful RF Prospects For years, microwave companies have been selling components for medical imaging applications, such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) systems. While imaging continues to offer viable opportunities, many additional medical application areas are emerging for wireless microwave and RF technologies. Remote monitoring, for example, allows patients to stay at home while health status reports, such as blood pressure and pulse rate, are sent wirelessly to... — Nancy Friedrich May 2010 RFID Chip Helps To Reduce Safety Concerns WOLLERAU, SWITZERLAND —IDS Microchip began shipping development kits to early adopters for a novel radio-frequency-identification (RFID) sensor and data logging chip. Dubbed the IDS-SL900A, the chip is based on the EPC second-generation standard for supply chain applications. It therefore enables a vast new array of medical, food, healthcare, and environmental-supervision applications that ensure quality and/or freshness. This RFID chip can... — Dawn Hightower May 11, 2010 Sizing Up Benefits Of Wafer-Scale Packaging Wafer-scale packaging (WSP) is a bold new approach to housing semiconductors. It uses a semiconductor process to create a package around an IC—a package that is only slightly larger than the chip itself. To learn more about WSP technology, don’t miss this FAQ, sponsored by Avago Technologies — Staff  prev. page
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