Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. announced a major development in mobile antenna tuning in the form of its new DuNE™ technology. The patent-pending digitally tunable capacitors are made possible by the firm's UltraCMOS™ process and HaRP™ design innovation. The new digitally tunable capacitors (DTCs). Peregrine’s new DuNE DTCs have been designed for 5 b tuning resolution or 32 tuning states. The capacitors feature quality factor (Q) of 4 to 70 at 470 to 862 MHz for a tunable capacitor with range of 1.36 to 6.30 pF.

According to Tero Ranta, Manager for Advanced Technology at Peregrine, "One of the most significant challenges facing the mobile handset designers is the poor antenna performance for multiband multi-mode handsets. Dynamically tuning the antenna to compensate for the increasing bandwidth requirements and environmental effects will significantly improve the antenna performance. Until now, no tunable element met the needs of the mobile products industry in power handling, reliability, high volume production and integration. Peregrine’s DuNE Technology is the key to unlocking the future of digital tunability in mobile RF systems."

Peregrine Semiconductor Corp. (www.psemi.com)