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RF relays race ahead
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20/03/2008
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Once a relatively small market, growing demand for low cost, high specification rf switching relays has turned this sector into one of the fastest growing global markets.
Two decades ago, a manufacturer of commercial relays would have offered the occasional ‘military’ rf switching relay. This device would, more than likely, have been designed to a MIL 5757 specification. In reality, this would have made the part too expensive for use in most high frequency applications. Alternatively, you could specify the ubiquitous coax cable based relay that typically matched the size of a large transformer – providing, of course, the equipment was of a suitable size. Unfortunately, this was not an incentive for designers to miniaturise circuits.
Many new telecommunication applications – such as high speed internet systems, video on demand and picture messaging – require very high bandwidths and the need to use ever higher frequencies, from the 1GHz cellular telephone systems to frequencies in excess of 30GHz, has forced relay manufacturers to design and produce relays capable of efficient switching at previously unconsidered frequencies.
A good example of this change is the demanding test and instrumentation markets. Relays capable of switching in the 40 to 50GHz region are being requested in order to provide the resulting test equipment with suitable specification. Such frequencies levels were rarely considered some years ago.
To meet this growing demand, leading manufacturers, such as Panasonic, have invested in research programmes aimed at extending their product ranges. In addition, individual and multiplexed units have been developed in order to allow the design of modular multichannel switching banks for both test and redundancy use.
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Author
Richard Thornton
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