RF transceivers target budget broadband

Athena Semiconductors has developed a new family of radio frequency ICs to serve emerging wireless WiMax and WiBro broadband applications.

Athena Semiconductors has developed a new family of radio frequency ICs to serve emerging wireless WiMax and WiBro broadband applications.

The first two devices available in the product family are the ATS9050 and ATS9020, and other devices are being planned.

These devices are highly integrated RF transceiver ICs to serve IEEE802.16 standards-based WiMax and WiBro applications.

The ATS90xx devices incorporate breakthrough levels of integration allowing for low cost deployments of both fixed wireless and mobile applications based on WiMax and WiBro standards.

The high performance specifications of the ATS90xx devices allow deployment in the harshest of environments for outdoors applications.

Unlike wireless local area networks, outdoor broadband deployments, which are cornerstones of WiMax and WiBro capabilities, require the RF transceivers to meet specifications that are tougher to implement in low cost chips.

ATS90xx chips have excellent phase noise characteristics independent of channel spacing, very clean transmit characteristics in terms of the error vector magnitude (EVM) and wide receive dynamic range due to very low noise figure and high linearity.

Athena Semiconductors has been able to achieve breakthrough performance on the tough specifications of WiMax/WiBro in a standard CMOS process by deploying its OptimRF technology.

The ability to gain this performance in standard CMOS technology will enable lower price points across the board - from designers to customers.

Athena's OptimRF technology allows tighter calibration of RF transceivers during power up.

Athena has successfully used the OptimRF technology in a variety of products addressing different wireless standards applications.

The company has quickly established itself as a leading innovator in CMOS RF technology, for example by previously unveiling other WLAN and multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) chipset solutions.

The ATS9050 is a complete RF transceiver that can support either WiMax or WiBro applications.

The ATS9020 device serves only the WiBro standard offering an even lower cost alternative.

The ATS90xx devices have advanced frequency synthesisers that allow any arbitrary centre frequency with a resolution of 200Hz.

The devices also have highly programmable channel bandwidths supporting channels up to 40MHz.

The ATS9050 chip covers the frequency bands of 2.3-2.5, 4.9-5.35 and 5.47-5.85GHz and the ATS9020 covers the 2.3-2.5GHz band.

Initial WiMax deployments are expected in the 5.725-5.85GHz UNII band and the WiBro applications will be deployed in the 2.3-2.4GHz band.

ATS90xx devices can be easily combined with baseband chips to produce complete wireless broadband solutions.

"We are extremely pleased to extend our OptimRF technology to serve the emerging wireless broadband market", said Pratap Reddy, President of Athena Semiconductors.

"The ATS90xx is a product that further showcases Athena Semiconductors' technology leadership in CMOS RFICs".

"WiMax and WiBro represent potentially huge markets, and our ATS90xx devices provide a low cost alternative to today's solutions".

"We are working with partners that are developing complete solutions for wireless broadband applications".

Both ATS90xx devices are currently being sampled.

ATS9020 devices are also available in production quantities.

ATS9050 device will be available in production quantities in the second quarter of 2005.

Pricing will vary by quantity and configurations.

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