100W power limiter offers repeatable receiver protection

UltraCMOS power limiters provide a monolithic alternative to discrete, PIN-diode limiters based on gallium-arsenide (GaAs) technology and protect devices against excessive RF power, intentional jamming and ESD events.

The device delivers reliable and repeatable power protection to sensitive low-noise receivers for test-and- measurement equipment and wireless-infrastructure transceivers.

“Peregrine’s monolithic power limiters offer our customers a novel and robust approach to excessive RF power protection,” says Kinana Hussain, director of marketing at Peregrine Semiconductor. “The introduction of the PE45361 builds upon the key RF performance and bill of materials (BOM) cost advantages of our UltraCMOS limiters, while providing 100W power handling and low limiting threshold to protect sensitive low-noise amplifiers (LNAs).”

Compared to PIN diodes, UltraCMOS power limiters provide a 10–100x improvement in response-and-recovery time, deliver 10–40dB linearity (IIP3) improvement and offer a 20x improvement in ESD protection. In addition, UltraCMOS power limiters are 8x smaller than the board space required by PIN-diode solutions.

Finally, the limiting threshold can be adjusted through a low current voltage control pin (VCTRL), eliminating the need for external components such as DC blocking capacitors, RF choke inductors and bias resistors.

Like other UltraCMOS power limiters, the PE45361 features two operating modes—power limiting and power reflecting—to maximise performance and flexibility. These modes can be selected through the programmable VCTRL pin.

In power-limiting mode, the device is invisible to the load. When the incoming RF signal power exceeds the limiting threshold set through the VCTRL pin, the device limits the input RF power. Power-reflecting mode is used in more extreme conditions, and the device reflects most of the incident power back to the source.

Covering a wide frequency range from 10MHz to 6GHz, the PE45361 power limiter provides exceptional power protection for high performance, power-limiting applications.

It features a high pulsed power handling up to 50dBm and 100W, an adjustable limiting threshold from 5dBm to 13dBm and a positive threshold control from 0 volts to 0.3 volts.

The PE45361 delivers low insertion loss of 0.95dB at 6GHz and high return loss of 15dB at 6GHz. With a fast response time of 1 nanosecond and a speedy recovery time of 20 nanoseconds, the PE45361 exhibits high linearity of 37dBm IIP3 and excellent ESD protection of 3kV HBM.