Advanced RF power process technology from Freescale lowers costs and power consumption of cellular transmitters

Eighth generation high-voltage RF Power LDMOS reduces power requirements for high-data rate standards

BARCELONA, Spain (Mobile World Congress) .– Freescale Semiconductor has introduced its next generation of laterally diffused metal oxide semiconductor (LDMOS) RF power transistors to meet growing demand for reduced power consumption in cellular transmitters.

Building on its legacy of RF power transistor leadership, Freescale’s eighth generation high-voltage (HV8) RF Power LDMOS technology is engineered specifically to meet the stringent demands of high-data rate applications such as W-CDMA and WiMAX, as well as emerging standards such as LTE and Multicarrier GSM. The portfolio of devices based on HV8 technology is optimized for operation in advanced power amplifier architectures, which includes Doherty used in combination with digital pre-distortion (DPD).

A primary benefit of Freescale’s HV8 technology is the increase in operating efficiency that helps reduce total power consumption of a base station system, thereby reducing operating costs. In addition, HV8 has been optimized to withstand the more demanding operating environments of advanced system architectures.

“Freescale has realized significant performance improvements that enable LDMOS to continue as the dominant technology for power amplifiers,” said Gavin P. Woods, vice president and general manager of Freescale’s RF Division. “When used in conjunction with advanced architectures or in legacy systems, our HV8 portfolio is expected to enable considerably higher levels of system efficiency in next-generation transmitter designs.”

Initial product offerings will encompass power levels ranging from 100W to 300W. Additionally, HV8 products are designed to leverage and extend Freescale’s low-cost over molded package portfolio to provide superior value and to cover the major frequency bands ranging from 700 MHz to 2.7 GHz.

Transistors optimized for operation in the 900 MHz frequency band are expected to be the first to benefit from the HV8 RF Power LDMOS technology and to effectively address the stringent requirements of multi-carrier GSM systems. Doherty reference designs have been optimized specifically for the MC-GSM market to showcase the excellent efficiency and DPD-correctable performance, even under some of the most stringent signal configurations.

HV8 performance results

As an example of HV8 performance, a symmetrical Doherty reference design using two MRF8S9260H/HS transistors designed for multicarrier GSM applications was shown to deliver 58.0 dBm (630W) peak power, 16.3 dB gain and a drain efficiency of 42.5 percent at an average output power level of 49.4 dBm (87W) with good broadband linearity. DPD evaluations have shown this reference design to correct very well with six GSM carriers in signal bandwidths of up to 20 MHz.

Similar performance results have been achieved with MRF8S9260H, MRF8S9170N, MRF8S9200N and MRF8P9300H transistors.

Freescale’s HV8 LDMOS platform effectively addresses the cost, performance and reliability requirements of power amplifier manufacturers and underscores Freescale’s commitment to be recognized as the RF leader in communication systems.