Help customers reduce time to market by bringing high-performance, cost-effective, silicon-based gallium nitride RF systems to commercial applications

     MACOM Technology Solutions has announced the launch of a development kit designed to help commercial Oems quickly and easily adapt their product designs to incorporate gallium nitride-based RF energy sources into a variety of applications such as cooking, lighting, industrial heating/drying, medical/pharmaceutical, and automotive ignition systems. Commercial Oems use solid-state RF energy as an efficient, precise energy source that will enable future generations of products to achieve new levels of performance and affordability.

     MACOM's new RF Energy Toolkit (beta version) is now available to help system designers simplify and accelerate product development, enabling them to easily fine-tune RF energy output levels to maximize efficiency and enhance performance. MACOM's RF Energy toolkit combines the benefits of its silicon-based gallium nitride power transistors with intuitive, flexible software and signal control capabilities that eliminate guesswork in the RF energy design phase, helping to reduce time to market.

     The MACOM silicon-based gallium nitride power transistors that come with the RF energy kit are up to 10 percent more power efficient than comparable LDMOs-based transistors at the same price point - a major advantage for continuous wave RF energy applications, with higher efficiency, lower power consumption and lower operating costs over the course of continuous use. System designers can choose from a range of MACOM power transistors to meet the requirements of power levels from 30W to 1000W, and the kit supports coherent channel operation, allowing for easy combination of multiple RF energy channels, such as 3x300W or 2x500W. Support ranges from 915MHz to 2.45GHz.

     "Commercial Oems are eager to capture the huge market opportunity for high-performance RF energy systems with silicon-based gallium nitride, but they don't want to invest resources in designing RF power components themselves." Says Mark Murphy, senior director of RF power at MACOM. "The RF Energy Toolkit helps Oems eliminate this design burden by providing an affordable and easy-to-use platform through its RF energy-based systems that simplifies system design and reduces development costs, helping their products reduce time to market."

     "The current RF energy toolkit is' leading the way 'in the industry in a number of ways: the toolkit is an easy-to-use and very flexible compact controller that operates independently according to an extremely fast hardware-based reflection coefficient optimization scheme," said Klaus Werner, Managing director of MACOM design partner pinkRF. "In addition, the toolkit can also run complex formulations alone, or with other controllers that are remotely programmed or embedded with any number of RF vectors (power, phase, frequency, time, and energy) to control complex or variable processes." The tool connects to a power amplifier - no special integration required. I see it as the RF energy engineer's Swiss Army knife for controlling, optimizing and industrializing RF energy applications and their associated controllers."

     A beta version of the RF Energy Kit is now available to qualified customers, with expanded availability planned for fall 2017. MACOM will present its new RF energy toolkit and industry-leading silicon-based gallium nitride portfolio this week at the IEEE International Microwave Conference (IMS) in Honolulu, Hawaii.