Date: 13/06/2012

Gallium nitride RF power amplifier from Freescale for cellular infrastructure applications

Freescale Semiconductor has announced its first RF power amplifier product AFG25HW355S built using gallium nitride (GaN) technology. The company's RF power GaN products will initially target the cellular infrastructure market, with potential future applications including avionics, radar, ISM and software-defined radio.

The current RF power offerings include 12V, 28V and 50V silicon LDMOS products, 5V GaAs HBT, 5V and 12V GaAs pHEMT solutions, and high-frequency SiGe technology featuring operation up to 100 GHz.

"Freescale's GaN RF power solutions underscore our technology-agnostic approach to the RF power market," said Ritu Favre, vice president and general manager of Freescale's RF division. "Working with GaN in development since the mid-2000s, we have established an ideal blend of cost-efficiency, performance and reliability, and the time is now right to add GaN-based products to our broad array of RF power amplifier solutions."

The AFG25HW355S is a 350W, high-performance-in-package (HiP), 2:1 asymmetric device with the following features:

1. 2.3 GHz-2.7 GHz
2. 56 dBm peak power
3. 50% efficiency
4. 16 dB gain
5. NI-780 packaging

The main advantages of using GaN technology in power amplifiers are smaller product form factors, low parasitic loss, elevated power density and higher-frequency operation.

Potential GaN cellular applications include quasi-linear, high efficiency (Doherty), high-powered pulsed (non-linear) applications, broadband PAs and switch-mode amplifier configurations.

The AFG25HW355S is planned for full qualification and volume shipping by Q2 2013.