Microwave Engineering November 1999
Cover story
One of the most senior European Commissioners, Vice President Neil
Kinnock, visited the high frequency labs at the University of Cardiff
last
month. He is pictured alongside Paul Tasker, and Sam Luke of
Agilent Technologies. The postgraduate work for Nokia, on high power
measurements in the time domain, is reported on page 11 of this
issue.
One side of the wafer
As we head into November the opportunity arises to start looking
back over the technology we've seen in action over the last month
or two.
You'll be pleased to hear that we only have in mind the
last couple of months and not the whole millennium: the next eight
weeks will bring plenty of views on the impact of this or that in
the twentieth century and the second millennium - you certainly
don't need another one from us!
One of the most intriguing features of October was the contrast
between the GAAS '99 conference in Munich, part of the European
Microwave Week organised by Microwave Engineering Europe, and the
IEEE-organised GaAs IC Symposium in Monterey, California. Both featured
some very good papers and you can read two of the prize winning
GAAS '99 papers in this issue, after reading a report on the GaAs
IC event in our Focus on Components in Wireless. From these edited
highlights it is difficult to form an overview but our impression,
from
attending, is that the European conference has now established
itself with an audience which comes closer to sharing a common perspective
on the future of the high frequency semiconductor industry.
The Monterey symposium kicked off with a couple of good review
papers. The first announced that GaAs MESFET Technology was, at
best, on the way out. The second paper, reviewing the market for
GaAs devices, then told the
audience what they presumably already
knew, that about two thirds of them were still active in GaAs MESFETs.
It was as if the significance of the traditionally Christmas dinner
had been revealed to the unsuspecting turkeys and geese!
As these were morning sessions, one can only speculate how many
of the MESFET engineers suffered indigestion as they contemplated
the morning's messages over lunch, but there was worse
to come.
An engineer from Infineon boldly announced that his company was
already prepared for production of RF components on SiGe, using
6" wafers and with the capacity to start up to 2,000 wafers per
week. By the way, that capacity already exists in BiCMOS and the
company is happily delivering RF transceivers for cellular phones
out of that process.
If that wasn't enough, his final nail in the
MESFET coffin came
with the announcement that the operating voltage in SiGe power amplifiers
was so low (2.2V) that even power amplifiers would thrive in this
technology for cordless telephones.
Against that background, you may recall the comments made by a
top manager at Intersil, reported in last month's issue, that SiGe
was expensive and that his company was looking for cheaper alternatives.
One
view comes from a company with no in-house fabrication facility
(in SiGe that is) while the other view comes from a company, Infineon,
with bucket-loads of capacity and a confidence that the complexity
of the SiGe fabrication process is not a problem because it affords
flexibility in the RF design. The views certainly seem to come from
opposite sides of the wafer, as well as opposite sides of the Atlantic.
Paul Jackson
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Contents
In focus
30W bias T's developed for Nokia power amps; RAKE receiver
breaks
BER barrier; 2000 MEE Workshop Programme; Explore Microwave Engineering
Online; European Microwave Week - A pictorial overview
Focus on Components in Wireless
The single chip radio - fact or fiction?; Single-chip dual PA suits
GPRS; System-on-a-chip realised for radio transceiver; Direct conversion
diminishes radio dimensions.
The current state of CAD - a users'
perspective
In our previous CAD Benchmark in the May issue, a panel of CAD vendors
gave their views on the state-of-the-art in design tools and the
challenges that lay ahead. In this month's Benchmark Helen Duncan
turns the tables and lets some of the CAD users air their opinions.
A Scalable LDMOS amplifier
for digital
audio broadcast
With the popularity of LDMOS for power amplifiers now established
Cynthia Blair and Henrik Sjoden of Ericsson Components describe
a LDMOS based PA for digital audio broadcasting which provides 240
Watts at 1.5GHz
A novel single card FMCW radar transceiver
with on board monopulse processing
Winner of the first
Mini-Circuits Student Fellowship at last month's
European Microwave Conference, this paper describes a single card
FMCW transceiver with a four element active antenna array. The authors
are Jonathan D. Fredrick, Yongxi Qian and Tatsuo Itoh, Department
of Electrical Engineering, University of California, Los Angeles,
USA.
94GHz low noise amplifier on InP in
coplanar
technology
SiN has been used in this 2 stage LNA for use at 94GHz in this paper,
which won the best paper award at last month's GAAS '99 conference.
The authors are Virginie Hoel, Samuel Boret, Bertrand Grimbert,
Gilles Apercé, Sylvain Bollaert, Henri Happy, Xavier Wallart,
and Alain Cappy.
MMIC lumped and transversal filter
with LC tuned amplifiers
In this paper, which was awarded the prize for the best poster paper
at the GAAS '99 Conference last month, the authors compare the performance
of MMIC active transversal filters using different transversal elements.
The authors are M. Gabriela Marques, K. W. Tam, J. Caldinhas Vaz
and J. Costa Freire.
Sommaire d'articles
Zusammenfassung der Artikel
New Products and Data
Calendar
Classified
Catalogue Update & Appointments
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