With Peregrine UltraCMOS being used increasingly in many RF developments, the company has found the need to develop the technology to extend the frequency limits to DC and further into the microwave region.

Peregrine has pioneered the use of its UltraCMOS silicon on sapphire technology and found that it has been able to offer improved performance over other technologies including gallium arsenide, GaAs, silicon germanium, SiGe, and bulk CMOS.

Most technologies have their areas where they perform particularly well. GaAs for example gives a good high frequency response for microwave applications, SiGe has a high upper frequency limit, and bulk CMOS is ideal for logic and lower frequency RF applications. What Peregrine has been able to achieve is to use UltraCMOS to provide equivalent levels of performance to these individual technologies, but using a single technology. This, the company states, allows monolithic integration of multiple functions without compromise to the performance.

SOI technology makes the best use of CMOS technology. CMOS is very repeatable, consumes little power and has an established fabrication technology. The sapphire insulator has a major advantage in that it provides a loss an order of magnitude lower than alumina which is often used. Combining SOI and CMOS technology provides an ideal platform for highly integrated multifunction ICs that are able to provide high levels of performance at RF and microwave while still being able to integrate logic and other functions as well as requiring little power which is a key requirement for any battery power equipment such as mobile handsets.

Using UltraCMOS technology, Peregrine has introduced new chips that extend the frequency limits well into the microwave region and down to DC.

To reach into the microwave region a new X-band core chip (PE82670) has been introduced. This includes a six bit phase shifter, a six bit digital attenuator, RF path switching and serial bus interface. This chip is aimed at radar applications where it can be used in phase array radars systems where they are incorporated right at the array itself - here size and performance are key. Traditionally thin film technology where a GaAs gain and phase shifter may be used along with switches and serial to parallel converters are needed. These naturally occupy more space and are very costly. They also have a reputation of being unreliable. The new PE82670 X-band core chip is able to improve on performance while also reducing cost and size as well as improving reliability.

For future this technology could be used to provide chips aimed at 5G developments where it is anticipated that frequencies of 20GHz and higher are expected to be used.

At the end of the spectrum, Peregrine has introduced a new RF switch designated the PE42020. In this chip the frequency response has been extended to 0 Hz, something that was not previously possible with older technologies. The new performance improvements and extended range enables the switch to replace relays. Previously electromechanical relays have been the only viable option where a frequency response extending to 0Hz has been required. The new PE42020 switch is able to operate between 0Hz and the upper limit of 8 GHz.

The issue with FET based RF switches has been that it is necessary to couple the gate to the source to overcome the inherent distortion. Using a capacitor, performance falls at low frequencies as the capacitor reactance increases. Peregrine have developed a proprietary mixed signal approach to overcome problem this and extend the frequency to DC without affecting the high frequency performance.

This new technology effectively combines what would previously have required solid state logic, mechanical relays or MEMS technology into one chip by using the UltraCMOS technology.

The introduction of these new products demonstrates the versatility of the UltaCMOS technology and the way in which it appears to have a significant roadmap ahead of it for the future.

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