ASTRON 01, the first custom designed RF-chip, 1997

© ASTRON

In the second half of the late 90's, ASTRON cooperated with Catena electronics in Delft on the design of a quadrature mixer chip in Si-technology for application in the IVC, the IF to Video Converter system of the DZB. The quadrature mixer was used to build an image rejection mixer with 30-40 dB image suppression, converting 20 MHz sidebands from 200-220 MHz intermediate frequency to a 20 MHz baseband, for further processing by the correlator. The chip was successfully applied in the Converter Modules of the IVC, in use at the WSRT since the beginning of this century, with hardly any failure of the chips over almost 15 years of contineous operation.

The pictures show the ASTRON 01 chip on a test and evaluation board, as well as close views of the interior of the chip at 20x and 100x zoom.