Voltage-controlled PIN diode attenuator with a temperature-compensation circuit

This paper presents a voltage-controlled PIN diode attenuator and its temperature-compensation circuit composed of a thermistor and simple operational amplifier circuits. After carefully investigating the temperature characteristics of PIN diode attenuators, we designed voltage-controlled PIN diode attenuators showing the linear attenuation characteristics of 16 dB with input voltage within the operating temperature range. The fabricated attenuator has demonstrated the improvement of attenuation variation from 15 to 0.5 dB in the temperature range from -15 to 65/spl deg/C.