Avago Readies Amplifiers for Cellular and LTE Base Stations

Avago Technologies announced two next generation, low noise amplifiers (LNAs) for cellular infrastructure base station applications, such as transceiver radio cards, tower mounted amplifiers (TMAs), combiners, repeaters and remote/digital radio heads.


Avago said its designs are optimized for ensuring best signal quality in crowded spectrum, where receiver sensitivity is one of the most critical requirements. Proper LNA selection, in particular the first-stage LNA, greatly affects the BTS receiver sensitivity performance. Low noise figure is a key design goal. Avago will offer a noise figure of 0.48 dB at 1900 MHz.


Another key design factor is linearity, which affects the receiver's ability to distinguish between closely spaced wanted and spurious signals. Third order intercept, OIP3, is used to specify linearity. At 1900 MHz and typical operating condition of 5 V/51 mA, Avago's proprietary GaAs Enhancement-mode pHEMT process technology gives a noise figure of 0.48 dB and an OIP3 of 35 dBm. At 2500 MHz and typical operating condition of 5 V/56 mA, the noise figure is 0.59 dB and OIP3 is 35 dBm. With a low NF and high OIP3, the new Avago LNAs offer more design margin for the BTS receiver path than previous amplifiers.
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