DuNE™ Antenna Tuning Technology

DuNE Technology for Cellular Applications

In addition to traditional cellular frequencies, today’s mobile phones may need to support frequencies from 0.7 GHz up to 2.7 GHz, for cellular bands as well as non-cellular services such as mobile TV, Bluetooth, WLAN and GPS. The RF transceiver of the mobile phone is designed for 50 Ohm impedance. Ideally, the antenna would match that impedance across the entire frequency band. However, small handsets have inherently narrow antenna bandwidth, poor antenna matching and low radiation efficiency, and, without antenna tuning, are ultimately are prone to antenna mismatch. To date, several first generation open-loop antenna tuning systems are being used in handsets, and development teams are beginning to design adaptive closed-loop antenna tuning systems. Micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and ferroelectric materials technologies (such as BST) have been used to implement tunable antennas and filters, however they are not yet proven for high-volume production and both typically require a high bias voltage (up to 30V or higher) to tune, requiring a separate CMOS charge pump and controller chip. Because UltraCMOS technology enables monolithic integration of RF, analog and digital circuitry, Peregrine’s single-die DuNE DTCs integrate high-Q tunable capacitors (Q=40 to 80 at 1-2 GHz) with a built-in low-voltage serial interface , in a chip-scale package offering a footprint that is 5 times smaller than competing technologies. Typical capacitance values range from 0.5pF to 10pF, with typical tuning ratios ranging from 3:1 to 6:1 with 5 bits or 32 states of resolution. In addition to >+38 dBm of power handling in 50 Ohm, DuNE DTCs feature high linearity (IP3 > +65 dBm) and switching speed of better than 5µs.