CIE Components in Electronics
Peregrine Semiconductor has unveiled a new line of UltraCMOS RF power limiters, including the PE45140 and PE45450, which are slated for release in May. These power limiters represent the industry’s first turnkey, monolithic solutions to provide an alternative to discrete, PIN-diode limiters based on gallium arsenide (GaAs).
UltraCMOS power limiters deliver simple, repeatable and reliable protection ideal for test-and-measurement, land-mobile-radio (LMR), wireless-infrastructure, military and radar systems.
“Peregrine has a reputation for best-in-class RF products, and we are pleased to extend that heritage into the new category of power limiters announced at EDI CON today,” says Duncan Pilgrim, director of marketing at Peregrine. “Our customers continuously find that incumbent GaAs-based RF solutions do not rise to the challenge of new complexity in the market, and they are investing in Peregrine’s SOI technology.”
On a chip eight times smaller than the board space required by discrete, PIN-diode solutions, Peregrine claims that its new power limiters are able to provide a 10-100X improvement in response and recovery time; and deliver greater than 40 dB improvement in linearity (IP3) and offer a 20X improvement in ESD (electrostatic discharge) protection.
Of particular interest to RF designers will be that the power limiters save PCB space with a small form factor; reduce BoM (bill of materials) by eliminating the need for extra components; and improve time to market by reducing in-design time and costs. According to Peregrine these new devices “beat” existing solutions in RF performance, including higher linearity to eliminate signal distortion, high ESD to ensure high reliability, wide bandwidth to enable design flexibility and fast response and recovery times to ensure robust protection of power-sensitive components and because Peregrine’s power limiters are based on UltraCMOS instead of GaAs, they can be closely integrated with other UltraCMOS RF components.
Peregrine’s UltraCMOS power limiters can protect:
- RF ports in test-and-measurement equipment
- RF front ends and low-noise amplifiers (LNAs) in LMRs
- RF receivers in wireless-infrastructure equipment
- Tactical radio receivers from intentional jammers in military warfare
- Transceiver (TRX) modules in radar systems
