Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation is a fabless provider of high-performance radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC). The company’s technology is used in many different applications across a wide range of markets, including aerospace and defense, broadband, industrial, mobile wireless device, test and measurement equipment and wireless infrastructure.
The company announced its collaboration with Intel’s LTE platform reference design with its DuNE tuning technology at Mobile World Congress (News - Alert), taking place in Barcelona, Spain until February 28 this week.
The solution Peregrine provides uses its propriety UltraCMOS technology, which enables the integration of analog, digital and RF circuitry. The chip-scale package has a footprint that is five times smaller than the technology of the competition.
Peregrine applies a third-generation tuning product with multidimensional tuning capability for fully covering the 41 available LTE (News - Alert) bands.
The monolithic tuning network combines three DuNE Digitally Tunable Capacitors (DTC), a MIPI serial interface and all of the tuning functions, in a single unit. The functions are bias generation, integrated RF filtering and bypassing, control interface and ESD protection. This is accomplished using a single-die DuNE DTC to integrate high-Q tunable capacitors at Q=40 to 80 at 1 to 2 GHz, with an inherent low-voltage serial interface.
The company’s design eliminates external parts and circuitry that would be a necessary component in the LTE platform. Peregrine’s DTCs are capable of meeting the demands of today’s networks by reducing the design size while improving signal and system performance.
“We are proud that Intel (News 
- Alert) selected Peregrine’s unique tuning technology as the multidimensional antenna-tuning solution for this latest LTE platform. We worked closely with Intel to develop this highly-integrated solution, which utilizes the best of what our UltraCMOS process and DuNE innovations offer—optimized handset efficiency, data rate, call integrity, and battery life. This win demonstrates confidence in our RF Front End tuning solutions and in our ability to solve the broad, highly-complex challenges of 4G LTE designs,” said Jim Cable, chief executive officer at Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation.
Edited by
Braden Becker
