Kota Microcircuits, Inc. has announced two wideband hybrid driver amplifiers. Designed specifically for output/drive amplifier applications, the KH560 and KH561 offer the following features:

Kota may be anew name to a lot of readers. The company is a managment spin-off of the thin-film technology of the former Comlinear Devision of National Semiconductor. The absorption of Comlinear was, in the opinion of many, poorly done by National with the really strong aspects of Comlinear and its people mostly ignored. The cultures of the two companies were not allowed to really gel together in the transition. The market potential of the thin-film technology is still extant and Kota is running with it. Some good ex-Comlinear employees also moved across to Kota and are positioning things well for the future.

These two parts show some of the power allowed by "hybriding" circuits without the limitations of a single piece of silicon. The output 20-V swing is high and can handle some heavy capacitive loads with the limitation on output current, keeping the circuits inherently stable; the 2nd and 3rd harmonic distortions are extraordinarily low for these frequencies and bandwidths, while the ability to pre-configure output impedance will allow for much simpler driver designs in a lot of applications. The impedance is set, incidentally, by the selection of the two resistors in the feedback network -- which also set the gain.

I would expect to see a high degree of acceptance of these parts in arbitrary waveform generators, function generators and ATE; They are also perfect for driving wide bandwidth SAW filters. The KH561 is a pin-for-pin replacement for the CLC561. The KH560 has been optimized for time-domain applications and the KH561 for frequency-domain applications.