Freescale Semiconductor has made additions to its RF heating portfolio with new solid-state RF power transistor products designed to take the place of magnetrons used in microwave ovens. The transistors are engineered to enable consumer and commercial microwave oven appliance OEMs to create differentiated solutions and novel product types for a new cooking paradigm. Solid-state RF power technology delivers highly efficient and controllable RF energy without performance degradation over time, providing customers with a longer lasting and economically feasible alternative to legacy magnetron-based microwave systems. Freescale’s full suite of RF heating products and essential development tools enable customers to create differentiated products that provide a better cooking experience.
Freescale’s new portfolio of high-power, high-efficiency RF heating products includes the MHT1003N, a 250 W transistor with 58 percent power added efficiency for 2.45 GHz microwave oven applications, and the MHT1002N, a 350 W transistor with 63 percent power added efficiency for 915 MHz microwave applications. They have been developed to withstand harsh RF heating environments, and are the industry’s first products housed in affordable plastic packages to operate at 915 MHz and 2.45 GHz. In contrast with traditional magnetron technology that relies on a crude on-off control where energy arbitrarily fills the microwave cavity and can result in uneven cooking, these solid-state devices enable a more effective use of energy that allows RF energy to be controlled and opens up new possibilities for imaginative oven shapes, sizes and functionalities. A magnetron can begin to lose its ability to produce RF energy after as little as 500 operating hours. Solid-state RF power has demonstrated reliability of up to a 20-year lifetime under continuous use, without performance degradation. This reliability helps to ensure that food cooks consistently over the appliance’s lifetime and reduces commercial kitchen downtime and repairs. Solid-state RF power technology offers a new world of opportunity for differentiated cooking and longer lasting products. By controlling where and when the RF energy is directed, OEMs can develop innovative cooking products such as ovens that allow for more precise cooking, greater consistency in quality of cooking, selective heating, and versatile and complex cooking combinations.
The devices are supported with Freescale’s innovative RF Power Tool system, which provides the capabilities required for operation, evaluation and optimization of Freescale’s industrial RF power devices.
RF Power Tool system
Freescale recognizes that enablement is key in the RF appliance industry, where customers may have little RF circuit design expertise and typically no RF lab instrumentation. It recently introduced the RF Power Tool system, the only comprehensive integrated RF power application development system to simplify the development of RF power applications and reduce time to market. The RF Power Tool system provides OEMs with portable, multi-functional instrumentation capabilities for key amplifier operation and measurements including gain, efficiency, bandwidth and bias requirements. It integrates multiple RF instrument capabilities into a single compact unit, thereby minimizing the size, cost and complexity of RF lab equipment needed for application development and reducing the need for a full bench of RF evaluation equipment. The system can be operated directly from a PC or front panel interface, and can be installed and operational in only minutes at a cost significantly lower than a traditional RF bench setup. Click here to learn more about the Power Tool from Freescale.
