Cavendish Kinetics launches RF MEMS tuner

NEWPORT BEACH & SAN JOSE, USA: TowerJazz, the global specialty foundry leader, and Cavendish Kinetics, announced that Cavendish's CK301 RF MEMS tuner has passed the 50 billion cycles test with zero part failures.

Additionally, the parts have passed standard JEDEC and SEMI qualification and select Mil-Std 883D and IEC tests. The CK301 RF MEMS tuner combines Cavendish's patented NanoMech MEMS technology with TowerJazz's high voltage CMOS and custom radio frequency interconnect processing, and has now been released for volume production at TowerJazz.

"The cycling data is impressive, especially as the reliability has exceeded the specifications from mobile phone makers by up to 100x" said Dr. David Howard, TowerJazz executive director and fellow. "The monolithically integrated chip is designed for reliability and manufacturability, and is taking full advantage of our standard semiconductor process tooling and MEMS process experience."

Cavendish's first generation MEMS products, which include the CK301, are innovative RF tuners specifically designed to overcome the antenna performance challenges experienced in today's LTE smartphones, which have to support an ever growing number of operating modes and frequency bands. In addition, larger displays and batteries, and ever thinner form-factors further constrain the antenna volume available in smartphones.

Antenna tuning is one of the most promising solutions to enable multiband antenna performance, but existing tuning solutions do not provide the characteristics required to make it work efficiently. Cavendish's RF tuners provide an industry leading ‘Q-Factor' (>200), are very low loss (dB), and enable the required tuning ranges so that RF designers can meet LTE radio performance requirements. In addition, Cavendish's antenna tuner is only 2mm2 in size and does not require other components, which makes it easy to implement in even the most challenging form-factors.

Cavendish's upcoming MEMS products will address the performance needs of LTE-advanced RF front-end components such as power amplifiers, filters and switches, to enable demanding next generation LTE carrier-aggregation and WiFi co-existence solutions.