Power SAWs

Applications employing digital signal processing (DSP) has mushroomed over the past fifteen years. DSP techniques are now employed in television and radio receivers, in telephones, in automobile engines, in medical diagnostics, in robotics, in military systems, to just name a few. Its popularity stems from its flexibility. DSP also parallels the advances made in low cost computers and specialized integrated circuits (ICs). In a few applications, however, these digital techniques are either too slow or consume too much power to be practical. Examples include ultra-high frequency (UHF) filters and convolvers. In such applications, analog techniques can often perform the same tasks much more efficiently. Of the analog techniques, those employing surface acoustic waves (SAWs) offer unique capabilities for processing signals in the 30 MHz to 2 GHz frequency range. We examine this technology and review some of its applications