Peregrine overcomes Doherty hurdles to maximise amplifier performance
Transceiver cards are facing an LTE-lead boom, but traditionally still suffer from performance issues related to mismatched phase and amplitude in the carrier and peaking paths in the Doherty amplifier architecture.
Now, Peregrine Semiconductor has launched a family of UltraCMOS monolithic phase and amplitude controllers (MPAC), which it says are the industry's first monolithic RF solutions to maximise Doherty amplifier performance.
Although widely used in the wireless infrastructure industry, Doherty amplifiers are difficult to manually implement and optimise. However, using a digital interface, MPAC enables alignment of the phase and amplitude between the Doherty amplifier's carrier and peaking paths.
There will be three products in the MPAC product family to cover the majority of frequency bands. The first, the PE46120, is currently sampling and caters for the 1.8 – 2.2GHz bands. The other two products will be released in the coming months.
