Anadigics, a leading supplier of wireless and broadband communications solutions, has introduced a new high performance balanced linear amplifier targeted for residential gateway, set-top box, and other digital interactive cable devices. The ABA3100 is a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) offering industry-leading noise and linearity performance in a cost-effective Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) solution.

"The residential gateway market is seeing tremendous growth, which in turn puts new demands on the cable infrastructure," said Ron Michels, Vice President of Cable and Broadcast Products at Anadigics. "Anadigics is committed to developing the devices needed to meet these new demands and enable tomorrow's communications technology. With the high-performance ABA3100, Anadigics continues to provide lower cost and high functionality solutions to industry leading manufacturers."

The ABA3100 is a single-supply design that delivers 12 dB gain across a wide 50-to-860 MHz bandwidth. Its balanced design leads to superior, reliable performance, resulting in a second order output intercept point of +60 dBm. The device also is characterized by its high linearity and low distortion while demonstrating a noise figure less than 3.2 dB across the 50-860 MHz CATV band.

Here is a really nice balanced CATV amplifier: Balanced in its architecture and balanced in its overall performance. The twin amplifiers would be fed from a balun and output through a balun in most applications and the only additional parts required would be a couple of feedback capacitors and a couple of inductors to filter RF from the 5-V supply rails.

With 12-dB gain from 80 MHz right out to 1 GHz, the noise performance is extremely impressive with numbers below 2.5 dB out to 300 MHz, just 3 dB at 800 MHz and still below 3.5 dB at 1 GHz. Return losses and phase performances are equally impressive and this is an amplifier that should be right at the top of the list for any gain makeup application, or any general-purpose application in any frequency it covers or across the whole performance spectrum. The noise performance also makes it attractive as a wideband LNA.