Microwave & RF solutions to be showcased at IMS 2018

At least eight of the company’s foremost engineers — including AVX Fellow, Ron Demcko; AVX Thin Film Marketing Director, Leonid Talalaevsky; AVX Worldwide Business Manager for RF/Microwave Ceramics and MLO, Edgardo Menendez; AVX Principal Technology Marketing Engineer, Larry Eisenberger; and Ethertronics Deputy General Manager, Americas, Chen Huang — will be onsite to introduce attendees to the features and benefits of a wide range of new and existing products, including:

• AVX’s new λ-Bridge (Lambda-Bridge) Series thermal conductors, which are compact, cost-effective, and extremely efficient, exhibiting high thermal conductivity, low thermal resistance, and capacitance so low that they are virtually transparent at RF/microwave frequencies.

• AVX’s new BP Series MLO band-pass filters, which are designed using high-order filter topologies, support 18 pass bands spanning 620–5,930MHz, feature an ultralow profile of 0.556mm or less, and exhibit excellent frequency response with low insertion loss, high out-of-band rejection, and steep roll-offs for a wide range of wireless applications, including: wireless communications systems, military and emergency first responder radios, UAVs, base stations, femtocells, microcells, wireless access points and terminals, and instrumentation equipment.

• AVX’s ruggedly constructed, ultraminiature (EIA 0402, 1005 metric) UBR Series ultra-broadband resistors, which are made with high-performance tantalum nitride (TaN) materials; utilise the company’s proprietary, automotive-qualified, glass-sandwich FLEXITERM surface-mount technology to provide an extra measure of protection against flexure damage during installation; employ 100% laser trimming to achieve tight tolerances; and deliver a 125mW power rating and a wider frequency range than competitors, extending from DC to 20GHz, in applications across the optoelectronic, automotive, telecom, broadband, and satellite communications markets.

• AVX’s ruggedised, 8W LP Series low-pass 1206 integrated thin film (ITF) SMD filters, which deliver excellent high-frequency performance with low insertion loss and extremely sharp attenuation in wireless applications with frequencies spanning 700MHz to 3.8GHz, including: military and mobile communications systems, wireless large area networks (LANs), global positioning systems, vehicle location systems, and satellite television receivers.

• Ethertronics’ groundbreaking 802.11ax WiFi Active Steering System, which doubles Wi-Fi performance and range with the combination of a steering processor and antenna switch and provides critical scalability for next-generation 802.11ax applications and was honored with an Electronic Products 2017 Product of the Year Award. The EC477 Active Steering Processor enables radio link optimisation on a per-antenna, per-client, per-packet basis, supports up to 8 x 8 MIMO antenna configurations, and combines signals to achieve up to 3dB additional gain of the radio link. The EC624 Active Steering Switch acts as a slave device to the steering processor, selecting the desired beam pattern of an active antenna on a moment-by-moment basis to keep the radiation pattern on target. Both devices use a data-over-coax signaling scheme that allows the devices to interact with both the antennas and each other over the same cable that carries the RF signal, eliminating the need for additional cabling and custom connectors and reducing costs compared to other MIMO configurations.

• Ethertronics’ new high-precision and cost-effective 5G mobile test chamber, which is designed to address the complex testing and verification challenges of 5G antenna performance in millimeter-wave bands. The ETH-5G-1000 test system has a compact, portable, and fully shielded design that frees up space in laboratories and production environments and rapidly provides comprehensive, high-precision performance characterisation for 5G over-the-air (OTA) testing — including gain, efficiency, directivity, polarisation, and beam characteristics, complete with 3D radiation pattern measurements — to thoroughly validate device-level ratio performance and accelerate time to market for new 5G millimeter wave devices. The advanced capabilities of the ETH-5G-1000 are also available through Ethertronics’ value-added testing services, which allow device manufacturers to outsource their 5G RF characterisation requirements.

“As the flagship conference of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, IMS has a long tradition of addressing issues of both immediate and long-term interest to microwave, RF, and millimeter-wave researchers, technologists, and practitioners. So, we’re excited to introduce attendees to our most recent contributions to this rapidly evolving industry,” said AVX Fellow Ron Demcko.

“Although we are perhaps best known for our capacitors, inductors, and filters, AVX has long offered a wide variety of state-of-the-art resistors, terminators, attenuators, diplexers, triplexers, equalizers, couplers, and power dividers all designed to provide peak performance in microwave and RF applications across a multitude of markets. This year, we’re also proud to introduce the latest complement to our existing solutions portfolio: Ethertronics’ innovative passive and active Isolated Magnetic Dipole (IMD) antenna systems for wireless applications across the mobile phone, Wi-Fi, defense, aerospace, medical, and IoT markets.”