The FCC granted EchoStar's 5G network buildout framework, enabling EchoStar to optimize and enhance its coast-to-coast buildout of the world's first cloud-native Open RAN 5G Boost Mobile Network.
Nubis Communications, Inc. announced a joint technology demonstration with Ericsson of high capacity data transmission with low power consumption and reduced deployment complexity for hardware-dense radio units in future RANs such as 6G RAN at ECOC 2024.
Preliminary findings indicate that worldwide telecom equipment revenues across the six telecom programs tracked at Dell’Oro Group—Broadband Access, Microwave & Optical Transport, Mobile Core Network (MCN), Radio Access Network (RAN) and SP Router & Switch—declined 16 percent year-over-year in 2Q24, recording a fourth consecutive quarter of double-digit contractions.
Rohde & Schwarz is showcasing its ARDRONIS C-UAS family, integrated through the updated SAPIENT standard protocol, at the NATO Technical Interoperability Exercise (TIE) event in Vredepeel, the Netherlands
Complementing PPI’s comprehensive range of high Q variable capacitors (air tubular, sapphire, zirconia, PTFE and air plate trimmers) are the film trim and 3 mm trimmer capacitors.
Fairview Microwave introduced an enhanced e-commerce website aimed at optimizing customer experience.
5G Americas announced the publication of its latest white paper, "ITU’s IMT 2030 Vision: Navigating Towards 6G in the Americas," which studies the ITU IMT-2030 vision and its implications for the Americas.
High Gain RF Amplifier
RF sensing and communication applications often involve very weak signal levels. It is often necessary to use RF Amplifiers to increase the gain, or signal level, of these signals in order to digitize them or otherwise condition these signals to usable levels. However, there are a few trade-offs to consider when increasing a signal’s power level, especially at very high gain factors.
As with all performance parameters and signal quality factors, attempting to improve one factor/parameter tends to require sacrificing another, or several. For instance, the gain bandwidth product (GBP) is a figure of merit that compares the open-loop gain of an amplifier with the available bandwidth at that gain level. With many amplifiers, increasing the gain lowers the available bandwidth, while attempting to achieve a wide-bandwidth necessitates using lower gain. Bandwidth in this case is defined as the frequency range over which the amplifier gain is relatively flat.
There are also other considerations when attempting to optimize an amplifier for gain. These include noise and stability. Typically, higher gain amplifiers also introduce higher levels of added-noise figure. Even with very low added noise figure amplifiers, the noise of the signals will ultimately also be amplified just as much as the original signal. This is why filters are often used at various stages in signal conditioning to limit the amount of out-of-band noise energy. However, it is often very difficult to remove the in-band noise that is added by increasing the gain of a signal.
With stability, the higher gain amplifier typologies must be carefully designed to avoid becoming unstable over the specified input signal energy, loading, and frequency range. This includes accounting for dynamic factors over the entire specified range of the amplifier’s operation, such as temperature and other environmental factors. As this requires accounting for the behavior of the load, high gain/RF Power Amplifiers are often tested using load-pull and other methods that vary the load behavior to properly qualify an amplifier design.
Though many RF amplifiers are designed with a fixed gain profile, some are designed to vary the gain over a range. These amplifiers are known as RF Variable Gain Amplifiers (VGAs), and exhibit the same trade-offs and fixed gain amplifiers, but also present more nuanced performance. VGAs are often used in test and measurement applications or automated testing. However, there are many types of integrated VGAs used for radio and radar designs that may benefit from operating at varying gain levels either at the signal input stage or output stage.
The post What Is High Gain and How Does It Impact Amplifier Performance? appeared first on Pasternack Blog.
Qorvo® introduces a new system-on-chip (SoC) solution for smart home devices, which is now sampling with key customers.
