HaRP™ Technology Enhancements, Overview
The Revolutionary HaRP™ Technology Invention
Peregrine’s revolutionary HaRP™ technology enhancements provide for new
RF architectures and unmatched linearity in RF front end solutions. The HaRP enhancements are applied to Peregrine’s
high power RF switch product line which enabled a long awaited breakthrough in Intermodulation
Distortion (IMD) required 3GPP standards body for GSM/WCDMA applications.
The first devices to be released on the HaRP-enhanced UltraCMOS process are the
PE42660/67x
RF Switches for quad-band
GSM and GSM/WCDMA handset applications. These platforms currently enjoy more than 70% of
the world handset market share. Peregrine’s newest switches provide for an ever-increasing
number of RF paths to connect to the antenna through a single CMOS device.
World-class Linearity: Essential for the cell phones of the future
The next generation of cellular phones will integrate multi-band WCDMA
and GSM in the same handset. The WCDMA system standard places high linearity
requirements for the RF front-end because some or all WCDMA bands must be
routed through a specially designed multi-mode antenna switch. The antenna switch,
which is usually connected directly to the antenna port without any filtering,
must be linear enough to cope with any unwanted outside signals introduced to
the antenna port without degradation of the mobile phone receiver performance. As
the current trend is towards for example 4xGSM (850,900,1800,1900) and 3xWCDMA
(850, 1900, 2100) front-ends, it becomes necessary to route some or all WCDMA bands
through a specially designed multi-mode antenna switch.
Running Out of GaAs?
GaAs-based multi-mode RF switches tend to experience increased
insertion loss and die size with linearity improvements. This is
because the conventional circuits need multi-stacked FETs or
multi-gate FETs and large gate width to achieve low distortion,
which results in large parasitic off-capacitances with degraded
insertion loss. Today, no GaAs-based switch can achieve the IP3,
harmonics and ease of use of Peregrine’s UltraCMOS HaRP-enhanced switches.
The UltraCMOS™ Solution
UltraCMOS technology is composed of stack of field effect transistors
manufactured on a perfectly insulating sapphire substrate, providing
the ability to pass high power RF signals. The HaRP invention allows
for extremely linear FETs which when stacked together provide for
ultimate linear performance. With HaRP, we're changing
the way you design RF. Forever.
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