By Carolyn J Dawson, TMCnet Contributor
WiSpry, Inc. is a reputed provider of tunable radio frequency semiconductor products for the wireless industry. Recently, the company announced that it now teams up with IBM (News – Alert) to develop MEMS process technology and produce its tunable RF product roadmap. This development includes WiSpry’s existing generation of tunable impedance matching products that are scheduled for production with a major tier-one OEM this fall. The development also consists of future generations of highly integrated products for the entire mobile terminal front-end.
In a release, Jeff Hilbert, the president and founder of WiSpry said that “Our joint development will enable handset OEMs to provide broadband tunability today, and provides a future-proof roadmap to monolithic tunable front-end devices. Working with IBM provides access to high volume and high performance silicon and to a roadmap synergistic with ours. In less than eighteen months, we have developed an integrated RF-CMOS MEMS manufacturing process, achieved first pass functional integrated CMOS/MEMS silicon and demonstrated product performance that exceeds our initial customer specifications. IBM’s execution has been flawless.” Facilitated by branded micro-electromechanical machine systems, WiSpry’s tunable RF devices are able to deliver matchless levels of performance. It offers more than 3dB of link resilience and up to 25 percent increased talk or web surfing time on a mobile device. With IBM’s standard 0.18m process, WiSpry can integrate the functions which were formerly unintegratable. This results in the provision of smaller footprint and lower BOM expenses. In a release, Michael Cadigan, the General Manager of IBM Microelectronics said that “IBM has a rich portfolio of specialty technology solutions for the RF / wireless market that we plan to deploy as we enable the WiSpry RF-MEMS technology. We believe that tunability will be a key enabler for the future of wireless front-ends and we support WiSpry’s vision of RF-MEMS solutions for this market.” WiSpry’s monolithic integration is aimed at high-growth applications that include 3G multi-mode, multi-band mobile wireless devices, broadband communications, and 4G LTE (News – Alert) terminals and infrastructure equipment. IBM is well known in developing and manufacturing semiconductors and process technologies around the world. It provides a rich roadmap of digital, analog-mixed signal and specialty process technologies.
Carolyn John is a Contributor to TMCnet. To read more of her articles, please columnist page.
Edited by Juliana Kenny
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