Pasternack Blog

A Centigrade and Fahrenheit converter is an essential tool in the world of RF, microwave, and millimeter-wave engineering. It’s a world where temperature stability is crucial to the performance of both active and passive components, and a Centigrade and Fahrenheit converter can help ensure such stability. Whether you’re working with antennas, amplifiers, or oscillators, understanding ..

Planar transmission lines are used to carry a variety of analog, RF, and digital signals on insulative, planar substrates from kilohertz to hundreds of gigahertz frequencies. Planar transmission lines are constructed of one or more layers of conductive traces, possibly with adjacent conductive structures, with dielectric layers providing insolation between the conductive structures. Planar transmission ..

RF power amplifiers typically have an input, output, and power supply rails. These rails can be either positive, negative, or dual positive and negative voltages. The input, output, and power supply rails all have recommended operating ranges of power, voltage, and current. This range is specified to nominal operation in what the manufacturer was able, ..

Pasternack has a milestone anniversary this year! Fifty years later, Pasternack products are as relevant and renowned as ever, and there’s no slowing down. To celebrate this momentous occasion, we recently had the opportunity take a trip down memory lane and learn the history of the brand from Murray Pasternack, the founder of Pasternack. Read ..

In an ideal RF system, all of the energy from the RF source is transferred to the load. An example of this would be a transmitter delivering a signal to an antenna with the interconnect between the two signal chain components operating at 100% efficiency. Clearly, this isn’t the case, and factors like impedance mismatch ..

Dielectrics are one of the three main categories of electrical materials, the other two being conductors and semiconductors. Common dielectrics used in electronic systems are ceramics, glasses, gemstones, and polymers. Dielectrics, or insulators, are described as being very poor electrical conductors, and unlike conductors, allow for electrical fields to pass through them. However, the electric fields ..

Conductors, semiconductors, and insulators are the main building blocks of virtually all RF/microwave electronics. Insulators have dielectric properties that impact the electric fields that pass through them. In order to design an RF component or device, detailed knowledge of the dielectric properties of the insulators used in the construction of the component/device is essential. The ..

Though Gallium Nitride (GaN) has been making headlines for the past several years as an emerging RF technology, RF semiconductors developed with silicon, namely RF silicon-on-insulator (RF-SOI), has also been advancing as a semiconductor of choice for the exploding RF hardware markets.  Where GaN is a still relatively expensive and small wafer technology, RF-SOI is ..

Ferrites are high electrical resistance, magnetic, and ceramic materials constructed from a mix of metallic oxides, often including Iron (Fe), Zinc (Zn), Manganese (Mn), Nickel (Ni), Cobalt (Co), Barium (Ba), and Strontium (Sr). These metallic oxides exhibit magnetic behavior that allows for their use in RF circuits as inductors, transformers/baluns, isolators, circulators, phase shifters, chokes, ..

In many cases in RF/Microwave electronics it is advantageous to generate, modulate, receive, and demodulate communication and sensing signals at frequencies lower than the RF transmission/reception carrier frequency. The frequency difference between the modulation/demodulation (baseband) signals and the RF signals may be so vast, that multiple frequency conversion stages may be required. In these instances, ..