DuNE™ Antenna Tuning Technology

DuNE™ Antenna Tuning Technology: Changing How You Design RF

What Is Antenna Tuning?

Because of the increase in new features, functionality and industrial design requirements, the space available for the mobile system antenna is shrinking at a rapid rate. As antennas are wrapped and repathed, they lose efficiency. Some of this lost performance can be recovered with antenna tuning, in which the system uses dynamic impedance tuning techniques to optimize the antenna performance for both the frequency of operation and the environmental conditions. Learn More

By applying proven, patented UltraCMOS™ process and HaRP™ switch technologies, engineers at Peregrine Semiconductor developed DuNE™ technology, a new design methodology used to design digitally tunable capacitors (DTCs). Supporting a wide range of tuning applications—from tuning the center frequency of mobile-TV and cellular antennas to tunable impedance matching and filters—DuNE products offer power handling, performance, and size advantages that are unrivaled by any other commercially-available digital tuning technology.

Proven Technology

DuNE technology uses building blocks and processing technologies that are already shipping in the millions per week to the handset industry. And, all parameters of DuNE devices, including capacitance values, tuning ratio, quality factor, and power handling, can be changed by circuit design instead of materials engineering, making it very fast to spin new designs.

Power Handling

In contrast to bulk CMOS and standard silicon on insulator (SOI) technologies, UltraCMOS FETs can be stacked to handle high RF power levels due to the fully-insulating sapphire substrate. For Peregrine DTCs, this allows power handling to be scaled from +20dBm to more than +40dBm in 50Ω, easily handling the high RF power levels encountered in GSM and WCDMA operation without degrading Q or tuning ratio. For example, DuNE mobile-TV DTCs have been designed to handle +28dBm nominal while DTCs for GSM/WCDMA applications handle more than +38dBm.

Unparalleled Performance

DuNE tunable capacitors can be designed with capacitance values from about 0.5pF to 10pF, with typical tuning ratios ranging from 3:1 to 6:1 with 5 bits or 32 states of resolution. Typical switching speeds are better than 5µs, and this new technology features power consumption of about 100µA (which is orders of magnitude lower than alternative tuning technologies).

Size Advantages

In flip-chip form, the first generation DTC for cellular handset antenna tuning measures 1.36x0.81mm. For mobile TV applications, the DTC die measures a mere 0.5mm2 which can then be housed in a 2mm x 2mm package with a built-in 3-wire serial interface.

Dune DTCs are poised to fundamentally change how antenna tuning is performed in RF applications, paving the way for unprecedented functionality in next-generation mobile communications designs.