The smartphone industry is proving a popular market for Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation’s, CMOS-on-sapphire RFIC as the company announces its billionth shipment of the device for this market. The new SP8T RF switch, designed on the latest UltraCMOS process technology version, STeP5 is said to be the driving force behind this. The technology associated with this release has driven need from cellular handset manufacturers and global customers for UltraCMOS RFIC products to a record number of devices per week. The 4G/LTE network has introduced significant challenges to the RF Front-End (RFFE) of the cellular handset, including a fragmented RF spectrum, which causes co-existence issues between bands and other standards such as connectivity (GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth). Lack of global frequency alignment has resulted in 28 LTE bands being identified in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) mobile standards specification.
Peregrine Semiconductor
