Peregrine – New RF Digital Step Attenuator Enables Flexible Wide Dynamic-Range Network-Infrastructure Designs (Peregrine Semiconductor UltraCMOS PE4312)

Peregrine Semiconductor has introduced its next-generation, UltraCMOS PE4312 digital step attenuator (DSA). Successor to the popular PE4302, the new PE4312 enables flexible, wide dynamic-range network-infrastructure designs that require highly accurate and efficient amplitude control. The device upgrade is ideal for wireless-infrastructure devices, broadband consumer and infrastructure equipment, land mobile radios (LMRs), test-and-measurement equipment and military RF applications.

“Peregrine created the category of digital step attenuators with the UltraCMOS PE4302, and today’s announcement of our next-generation DSA will enable us to preserve our market leadership as the DSA category demands evolve,” says Kinana Hussain, senior marketing manager, Peregrine. “Based on customer requests, the UltraCMOS PE4312 features an extended temperature range that enable RF engineers to simplify thermal design, wider power-supply range to enable flexible power-supply routing, 1.8 V-compatible control voltage levels to enable lower-power designs and higher ESD ratings to ease manufacturing flow.”

The UltraCMOS PE4312 digital step attenuator offers flexibility and performance for wireless- and broadband-infrastructure equipment, LMRs, test-and-measurement equipment and defence RF applications.

The PE4312 is the only DSA on the market to meet a low insertion loss of 2.1dB at 4GHz at any power-supply level between 2.3V and 5.5V. It also handles the industry’s widest temperature range between -40C and 105C and supports both 1.8V and 3V control logic. In addition, the PE4312 offers several improvements over PE4302 in attenuation accuracy ±(0.15 + 2% of attenuation setting), linearity (IIP3 of 59dBm) and switching speed (500ns).

Finally, the PE4312 features a novel architecture to provide safe attenuation-state-transition behaviour, which prevents positive power spikes that occur during attenuation-state changes when RF input power is applied. This feature simplifies the digital-interface design, improves signal quality and prevents damage to power amplifier sub-assemblies, says the company.