Pasternack Blog

The growing number of RF, microwave, and millimeter-wave applications has led to a growth in the number of RF transistor types, semiconductors, and configurations being used today. As more devices use RF/wireless technology to communicate and sense, there will be an even greater diversity of RF transistor technologies. RF Amplifiers and RF Mixers are a ..

Metamaterials are an increasingly researched topic, especially where it pertains to modern antenna structures. However, there is a lot of confusion of exactly what metamaterials are and how they are involved in the development of antennas. To put it simply, metamaterials are material and structure combinations that exhibit properties that are otherwise unknown to occur ..

Class III-V semiconductors, such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) and gallium nitride (GaN) have become commonplace solid state technologies for low noise amplifiers and high power amplifiers from frequencies ranging from several hundred megahertz to over 100 GHz. For high power applications, GaN high electron mobility devices (HEMTs) are supplanting GaAs metal-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MESFET) amplifiers, ..

RF Transformers are two, or more, port passive devices with a wide range of uses for many RF applications. One of the most common uses of an RF transformer is the Balun, which provides efficient coupling between unbalanced transmission circuits and balanced circuits. Other common uses are for impedance matching between circuits of different impedances. ..

Voltage Controlled Oscillators (VCOs) are a key component to many tunable communications, radio, radar, sensing, and measurement systems. Essentially, a VCO is an oscillator that can be controlled by an input voltage, usually analog. Hence, adjusting the tuning voltage across its range also changes the VCOs output RF signal, proportionally. VCOs are used as key ..