TriQuint Semiconductor, Inc. announced the availability of the TQ5M44, Low Voltage, High Performance downconverter mixer RFIC in support of Motorola's ReFLEX enabling initiative. This RF to IF downconverter chip is part of the complete ReFLEX narrow-band PCS chip set.

Motorola is making the ReFLEX two-way messaging architecture available, including software, transceiver chip set and applications development kit, to enable manufacturers to embed two-way wireless messaging in a wide array of products including automobiles, computers, consumer electronics, and industrial equipment.

The TriQuint TQ5M44 downconverter mixer, operating off only a single cell (1V) battery supply, provides the wireless signal frequency downconversion function of the chip set. While specifically designed for the ReFLEX frequency plan, the device is suitable for operation anywhere in the VHF to 900MHz frequency range, in a variety of wireless communications applications such as cellular and PCS phones, portable phones, WLAN products, and wireless remote control products.

The TQ5M44's exceptional RF performance at 1 volt showcases TriQuint's low voltage process capability. Wireless communications ICs based on this process can provide other functional blocks such as power amplifiers, low noise amplifiers, switches, or complete transceivers.

The TQ5M44 IC was developed through an alliance between Motorola's Paging Products Group and TriQuint's Foundry Services Division. "Motorola selected TriQuint's GaAs MESFET process because of its exceptional low-voltage RF performance and manufacturability" said Bruce Fournier, TriQuint Vice President, "High volumes and low manufacturing costs are key to success in paging applications." TriQuint offers merchant market IC foundry services for a wide variety of GaAs technologies including MESFET, pHEMT and HBT.

For more information about Motorola's ReFLEX technology, click here.

Motorola's announcement of the new ReFLEX architecture at Embedded Systems West was not a surprise but the market is excited and quite obviously looking to use the architecture and all the offered parts and services in considerable volumes. We should expect to see two-way messaging systems being offered in all sorts of products, certainly including cell phones, laptop computers, and automobiles. Although it is important -- as TriQuint notes in the press release -- that operating voltages be directed downwards as much as possible it is not necessarily so that a product can be operated from just a single cell. In many cases -- and nearly always in the pager market -- it will be to offer a much longer battery life in a two-cell design.

The part draws less than 1 mA from a 1-V supply and gives a 9-dB conversion gain at 900 MHz. The part is also operable up to 60 degrees C. It is in about as small a package as it could be (without being a BGA) in a 6-lead SOT23. The TQ5M44 could well be the most significant part that TriQuint has ever made commercially.

The TQ5M44 is in production and is priced at $2.98 in 10,000-piece lots, a price that had better be very flexible if TriQuint wants to make the numbers it can make from the part.