The International Microwave Symposium in Phoenix called itself the forum of choice for papers in the emerging RF and wireless growth areas. Judging by some of the technology on the exhibition floor, the event lived up to its advanced billing. Here are a few of the more notable developments we saw while walking the aisles.
Fast gigahertz-level switching from silicon
IMS featured a number of vendors that demo’ed silicon components able to equal or surpass the performance of GaAs equivalents. One such device in that category was this silicon SPDT switch from Analog Devices Inc. Dubbed the HMC1118LP3DE, it is specified to handle frequencies between 9 kHz and 13 GHz — interesting in that the low-end frequency is about one thousand times lower than that of GaAs parts. Settling time is also said to be about 100x faster than GaAs. The part handles 4 W of RF power and 0.5 W in hot-switching operation.
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