RF Tuning

Antenna Tuning
with UltraCMOS Devices

W hat is Antenna Tuning?

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

-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.

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