Nitronex Corp. has announced a family of HEMT RF power transistors based on its SIGANTIC (GaN on silicon) technology for the WiMAX market. The products’ ability to simultaneously deliver high frequency, high power and broad bandwidth provides better performance than alternative technologies to current and future WiMAX infrastructure designers, said Nitronex.

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Initially, the family will offer 10- and 50-W devices supporting both the 2.5 GHz and 3.5 GHz segments of the WiMAX market. Target customers are OEMS developing RF power amplifiers for fixed and mobile WiMAX infrastructure. The devices are designed to support broadband operation in these segments (2.3 GHz to 2.7 GHz and 3.3 GHz to 3.8 GHz) to allow greater design re-use and flexibility for OEMS. Devices for the 5.8 GHz segment of the WiMAX market are planned for introduction in 2006.

The NPT35050 (3.5 GHz, 50 W) is the first device in this product line to be released. It is designed for WiMAX power amplifier output stages. GaN’s higher power density enables the design of packaged devices with higher input and output impedances (20 Ohms), eliminating the need for output matching, and making the device easy for power amplifier developers to use. Using a typical single carrier OFDM (802.16d) waveform, the performance at Vds of 28 V and Idq of 1000 mA is 5 W of average output power with an EVM of 2%, efficiency of 18% and gain of 10 dB.

Other members in the family will be sampling in December 2005. All four parts are expected to be released to production in March 2006.