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Engineers who have only witnessed the challenges of wideband design from a distance may wonder why their peers take on such projects. After all, narrowband is more ‘comfortable’, with ample choices of low cost, high performance RF transistors. But for broadband applications such as two-way radios for first-responders, RF jammers and select radar or repeater applications, designing light-weight, highly portable end-user products is hampered by the necessity of large amplifier systems that trade efficiency performance for frequency bandwidth coverage.

In the narrowband universe, relatively high efficiency performance is possible when devices are placed in ideal impedance environments; delivering a cost-effective design approach is fairly straightforward. The broadband landscape is altogether different. Amplifiers are more difficult to design and the performance trade-offs can discourage even the most die-hard engineering intellect. Broadband high power amplifiers are typically inefficient comparatively speaking, resulting in larger, heavier systems. A wideband application by necessity often requires more elaborate cooling mechanisms and despite the best engineering efforts, exhibits inferior performance in key categories compared to narrowband counterparts.

For the design engineer who has fought the wideband battle and persevered, for those still struggling and for those who seek a better way, TriQuint has developed a solution. There’s a new discrete RF transistor that changes the equation dramatically and is already being designed into wideband systems around the globe. This new solution is called PowerBand^TM (see Figure 1).