Overview

The advent of the wireless telecommunications infrastructure has been responsible for one of the social revolutions in the last century ^[1]. In the beginning, the benefits of being able to communicate unfettered by landlines was taken advantage of in the business environment. As the networks grew in size and accessibility with concomitant reductions in cost, the benefits expanded to the consumer market ^[2]. In more recent years, the plethora of services available in the market have often led to wireless technology supplanting landlines demonstrating that a paradigm shift has occurred. Today, in many under-developed nations, it is often more economical to deploy a wireless network than to invest in the traditional telephone infrastructure.

The semiconductor devices discussed in this book are core components in wireless systems. They serve the purpose of boosting the strength of the RF signals to a level essential for consumers to access the telephone network over long distances. Although specific products are optimized for the requirements of individual networks, the operating principles for all these transistors is the same irrespective of the modulation schemes used in the network. The goal of this book is to provide the reader with an introduction to the different styles of silicon power Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFETs) that have been developed over the last five years to serve this market. Although the silicon bipolar RF transistors were predominantly used until 1995, the silicon RF MOSFETs have now completely displaced them in network base-stations. In order...