USA: Epcos AG's recent acquisition of NXP Semiconductor's Radio-Frequency Microelectromechanical Systems (RF MEMS) business establishes the company as the leader in a technology that promises to expand the capabilities and cut the costs and power consumption of mobile handsets, according to iSuppli Corp.

Munich-based Epcos this year said it would take over Netherlands-based NXP's RF MEMS business with the anticipation it will develop into a product line worth nearly 1 billion euros. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

RF MEMS technology can be applied to the radio-frequency front ends of mobile phones, including the antenna and the power amplifier. Using RF MEMS, these components can be made to be tunable, meaning they can support multiple wireless interfaces—including 3G, Wi-Fi and WiMAX—and can operate over a variety of frequency bands. Such capabilities are expected to become increasingly important as mobile handsets add new features while striving to maintain small form factors, low costs and efficient power consumption.

“To support such a wide range of interfaces and bandwidths, mobile-handset makers now are employing designs that use a multitude of components for the RF front end—as many as 100 parts in some cases,” said Jérémie Bouchaud, director and principal analyst, MEMS, for iSuppli.

“This represents an expensive, space-hogging, and inefficient approach to RF design. Alternatively, RF MEMS can cut the component count dramatically, producing front ends that are half the cost and size and are far less complex to design. This translates into a 10 percent increase in battery time for feature-rich phones. It also provides other benefits, including superior performance, fewer dropped calls and faster data rates.”

The most promising potential use for RF MEMS switches and switched capacitors in mobile handsets is in impedance matching networks for antenna matching and matching of Power Amplifiers (PAs). The main advantage of RF MEMS switches is their capability to be integrated with other passives, combined with their high performance, especially in the areas of linearity and low insertion loss.