GaAs MMICs for Cordless and Cellular Telecommunications: The Fight Against Silicon Odds

For a few years now the civil market for GaAs MMICs has budded into application niches such as 12 GHz DBS dowinconverters. The next large application niche which is rapidly emerging concerns low voltage L-band receive and transmit front-ends for cordless and cellular phones. In spite of forceful Silicon slurs, some GaAs MMICs have already made their way into coimmercially available handsets for GSM 900 MHz and DECT 1900 MHz standards. Tlis is readily accounted for by the swift change in the mobile market needs and the respective availability of low cost GaAs & Silicon RF IC products. After a thorough analysis of the low voltage performance, low cost and low weight requirements derived from handset specifications, an optimum RF front-end partitioning between Silicon and GaAs can be determined resulting in an optimumn RF cHip set.