Antenna Tuning by Psemi

RF Tuning
Antenna Tuning
with UltraCMOS Devices
W hat is Antenna Tuning?

Because of the increase in new features, functionality tuning the antenna to compensate for the increasing
and industrial design requirements, the space available bandwidth requirements and environmental effects will
for the mobile system antenna is shrinking at a rapid significantly improve the antenna performance. Further,
rate. As antennas are wrapped and repathed, they as the market demands new wideband services in the
lose efficiency. Some of this lost performance can be handset, such DVB-H and ISDB-T for mobile TV,
recovered with antenna tuning, in which the system uses the use of antenna tuning becomes a necessity. Until
dynamic impedance tuning techniques to optimize the now, no tunable element met the needs of the mobile
antenna performance for both the frequency of operation products industry in power handling, reliability, high
and the environmental conditions. volume production and integration.
Peregrines DuNE Technology is the
Industry Trends Drive Performance key to unlocking the future of digital
tunability in mobile RF systems. TECHNOLOGY
LTE-Advanced Network and Carrier Aggregation
specifications are pushing RFF Front End performance
Power Delivered to Antenna y
demands higher. This often requires additional 0
antennas or a multi-feed antenna to be added to the -1
handset which place further demands on antenna size
Power Delivered [dB]
Low
-2
or tuning selectivity. Tunable devices have proved Mismatch
Power Delivered [dB]
-3
highly valuable to supporting the increased bandwidth
demanded by LTE handsets by enabling small antennas -4
that are efficient across the entire LTE bands from -5

High
700MHz to 3GHz, saving battery power and enabling -6 Mismatch
Antenna Only
slim and thin designs. -7
With DTC
-8
0.65 0.70 0.75 0.80 0.85 0.90 0.95 1.00 1.05
The UltraCMOS Advantage Frequency [GHz]
One of the most significant challenges facing the mobile Figure 1. For fine RF tuning, Impedance Tuning,
handset designers is the poor antenna performance sometimes referred to as Matching, can be employed.
for multi-band multi-mode handsets. Dynamically
Antenna Tuning Methods Efficiency
DTC Tuned
Antenna
Impedance Matching: For fine RF Tuning on a limited
tuning range, Impedance Tuning, sometimes referred to
Passive
as Matching, can be employed. This solution tunes the Antenna
antenna to the entire system, creating a tuned matching
network which is added to the antenna input. This
Frequency
solution is easy to implement; tunable components are
used in shunt or series.
Aperture Tuning: For a wider tuning range, Aperture
Tuning is incorporated into the antenna design. In Return Loss
this design solution, the tunable component is added
to antenna structure itself, requiring modifications to
antenna. The electrical length of the antenna element is Figure 2. Antenna element length is adjusted dynamically to
tune the resonant frequency.
adjusted to shift its resonance to the desired frequency
band of operation. Band-switching has the advantage of
being able to achieve higher levels of performance than
input tuning since the actual radiating element is being
tuned. Tuning is achieved by loading with a Digitally
Tunable Capacitor (DTC), or by using a tunable control/
shorting switch. In both cases, the tuning components
must have low loss to avoid degrading the radiating Figure 3. Input Antenna Impedance Tuning/Matching
efficiency of the antenna. (left), and Antenna Aperture Tuning (right)
Additional RF Tuning Applications

Filter Tuning 6.8 nH 22 nH 6.8 nH
VDD VDD
Digital Tunable Capacitors can be employed to replace 6.8 nH 6.8 nH
varactor diodes in tunable filters. The DTCs enable
higher performance filter designs with significantly DTC DTC
higher linearity, fewer components for a lower filter

cost and less integration complexity with a SPI or I2C SDATA
control interface. SCLK

SEN
Figure 4. DTC Bandpass Filter Architectures
Phase Shifter
Digitally Tunable Capacitors and other DuNE-
enhanced RF Tuning products can also be employed
to implement a high-performance hybrid Phase Shifter
for antenna beam steering, delivering state-of-art
power handling, linearity, insertion loss, phase-shift
resolution, operational bandwidth, and small size
for any phase-shifter topologies and fabrication
technologies.
Figure 5. Phase shifters enable antenna beam steering.
2013 Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation. All rights reserved. The Peregrine name, logo and UltraCMOS are registered trademarks, and HaRP and DuNE are
trademarks of Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
All information on these pages are subject to change without notice. Consult website for latest specifications.
Peregrine products are protected under one or more of the following U.S. Patents: http://patents.psemi.com

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RF Tuning

W hat is Antenna Tuning?

that are efficient across the entire LTE bands from -5

The UltraCMOS Advantage Frequency [GHz]

Additional RF Tuning Applications

higher linearity, fewer components for a lower filter

control interface. SCLK

Figure 4. DTC Bandpass Filter Architectures

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