Murata Adds to Wireless Portfolio

Electronic News, April 23, 2001 by Bernard Levine

Future cellular potential prompts extensive passives development

SMYRNA, GA. -- The wireless market has already been a gold mine for passive component firms and promises much more in the future, prompting extensive new product development throughout the component industry. Murata Electronics North America unveiled new isolators and other passive parts targeting present and future wireless applications at a recent press gathering at its headquarters here.

Among the new entries unveiled by Murata are tiny 0201-size chip inductors priced below 10 cents each, with 0201 ferrite beads coming later this year.

The firm noted it also currently offers various capacitors, inductors and piezo-electronic devices, duplexers, isolators, couplers, baluns and filters for the wireless handset and infrastructure markets.

The potential for future wireless component business is huge. Each cellular handset alone contains hundreds of passive components. This helped drive the passives boom of recent years, which has only recently cooled because of the overall industry slowdown. Changing technology requirements as the wireless industry adopts new standards in coming years will require new types of componentry, with passives firms racing to have the parts ready.

Murata, a wholly owned subsidiary of Murata Manufacturing Co. Ltd. of Japan (nikkei: 6981), also showed off a new switchplexer it now has available in Europe, described as a front-end device developed for future 3G cellular phones. It allows three operating bands to be separated. Switchplexers from Murata for the United States will be available later after a final decision is made by the Federal Communications Commission on a WCDMA band. The European model introduced now is priced under $1.75 in 100,000-unit quantities.

On the isolator front, the company announced here the commercial production of the CE040 series ultracompact, lightweight and low-loss isolators for emerging, next-generation digital-wireless-handset standards such as WCDMA and cdma2000. The CE040 is priced less than $3 each at 1,000-unit or more quantities.

To meet demand for thinner, smaller and lighter products, Murata said it engineered a number of improvements to build upon the previous isolator. These developments include a new structure for the inductance section and the use of original magnetic circuitry and low-loss circuit technologies. Doing so enables reducing the overall package size while maintaining performance characteristics, the company said.

"We were proactive in applying our previous design experience to position our products toward this growing market," said Donald Widener, market segment manager. "As a result, we created a revolutionary product in terms of size and even designed the CE040 series to have a completely automated assembly process."

The CE040 series isolator measures 4mm x 4mm x 2mm and weighs approximately 0.1g. Compared to Murata's previous CE052 series isolator (5mm x 5mm x 2mm, approximately 0.2g), the new product is less than two-thirds the volume and approximately half the weight.

Pertaining to electrical characteristics, the isolator is 14 dB in the WCDMA transmission-side frequency band (1.920GHz to 1.980GHz). The operating temperature range is between minus 35 degrees Celsius and plus 85 degrees Celsius. Further, the insertion loss decreased to 0.55 dB, which is 0.05 dB lower than that of the previous product. The attenuation characteristics of second and third harmonics improved as well.