By printing thin film silver conductors on high-Q ceramics, Murata Electronics can now produce RF components with low profiles of just 0.4 mm. These components, which are called Planar High-density Passive Devices (PHPDs), also offer low insertion loss and wide bandwidth. The company will use this technology to fabricate filters, diplexers, baluns, couplers, impedance transformers, phase transformers, power combiners and dividers, directional power monitors and mode transformers.

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The first PHPDs offered by the company are Micro Chip Filters that measure just 1.2 mm x 0.8 mm x 0.4 mm. Aimed at WLAN, UWB, and other applications, these bandpass filters exhibit 1.3 dB of insertion loss across the 5.1 to 5.85 GHz IEEE-802.11a WLAN band. Compare that with 1.7 to 1.8 dB of insertion loss for a similar bandpass filter built in LTCC technology. One tradeoff with this technology is a reduction in out-of-band attenuation vs. that of LTCC-style filters.

Now sampling, the Micro Chip Filters are scheduled to go into mass production in Q1 of next year. Target pricing for the Micro Chip Filter is $0.12 each in production quantities.