hf/rf ZONE Products for the week of April 12, 2004
SiGe Semiconductor Says . . .
SE5103L/06L/07L: CDMA PAs Deliver Integration, Performance
And Price
Integrated devices allow designers to reduce cost by as much
as $3.00 at the system level
SiGe Semiconductor announced the industry's first commercially viable silicon-based CDMA power amplifiers. Leveraging a highly efficient silicon germanium BiCMOS process, the three power amplifiers achieve performance parity with GaAs-based devices, while delivering the integration, manufacturing and price benefits of silicon.
SiGe's new power amplifiers include the SE5103L, SE5106L, and SE5107L. All three devices feature industry-leading integration with on-chip digital or analog bias control, as well as an integrated power detector, 2.8V regulator, all matching and harmonic tuning. The highly integrated architecture allows designers to eliminate external components including the regulated switch, isolator and detector. Eliminating these components yields a cost savings of about $3.00 per handset.
The new RangeCharger power amplifiers feature excellent linearity of less than -50dBc at a peak output power of +28dBm, and a power added efficiency (PAE) exceeding 41 percent. Additional features include electrostatic discharge (ESD) up to 2kV, and load mismatch protection circuitry. These features ensure reliable performance under voltage standing wave ratio (VSWR) conditions of 10:1, at all phases and VCC_MAX.
"SiGe Semiconductor excels at linear PAs," said Jose Harrison,
product line manager, SiGe Semiconductor. "We've capitalized on all
of the benefits offered by silicon germanium to provide designers with the
linearity, efficiency and ruggedness required for high performance operation
while maintaining the superior heat dissipation, thermal performance, integration
and manufacturability characteristics of the silicon process."
analogZONE Says . . .
"The heat will be on!" as they say in Iron Chef (from the Fuji Television Network). SiGe has laid down the silicon gauntlet against GaAs and the only way that such vendors can react is in reducing profits for current product while they scramble for other solutions to compete. These amplifiers are going to make the battle for 824 - 849 MHz IS-95 and CDMA200 handsets very interesting indeed.
Using IBM's BiCMOS SiGe process, SiGe Semiconductor has produced products with numbers that rank up there with GaAs devices but by eliminating external power detection they are going to save the OEMs a bundle on the BoM, while using industry-standard pinouts gives the designer an opportunity of leaving an existing design alone and just dropping the SiGe part in.
All the parts are two-stage amplifier modules fully matched for 50 ohms at input and output. In AMPS mode the gain is typically 30 dB with a PAE of 52% (with a 3.4-V rail and outputting +31 dBm. All pass the 10:1 VSWR ruggedness test required.
CDMA performance offers a typical 28 dB in high-gain mode with an output power of +28 dBm and PAEs of 40%. High-gain mode quiescent current is typically 60 mA at 3.4 V and a sleep mode draws 2 µA. The worst 2f and 3f distortions are -33 dBc and -35 dBc with alternate channel linearity (±1.98 MHz) at -65 dBc.
To satisfy the market needs SiGe is offering two packages, a QFN-10 (4 mm x 4 mm x 0.9 mm) in the SE5103L with digital gain and linearity control of the bias supply, and a QFN-8 (3 mm x 3 mm x 0.9 mm) with either a digital gain and linearity control (SE5106L) or an analog gain and linearity control of the bias supply (SE5107L).
Receive band noise in all cases is a typical -136 dBm/Hz.
These parts are going to create another large jump in SiGe Corporation's future.
All parts are in production with the SE5103L priced at $0.80 and both the SE5106L and SE5107L priced at $0.85, all for 100-k piece lots. Evaluation kits are available.
Data Sheets available on request from SiGe Semiconductor