Reliability Milestone opens new applications for RF MEMS that are currently served by SOI Switches
SAN JOSE, Calif. – January 14, 2015: Cavendish Kinetics, the leader in high-performance RF MEMS tuning solutions for mobile and wearable devices, today announced that the company’s SmarTune™ RF MEMS tuners have passed 100 billion cycle lifetime testing.
“Reliability concerns have been a major adoption hurdle for RF MEMS for tuning, but Cavendish has worked hard to make reliability a non-issue, allowing OEMs to provide better performing smartphones using RF MEMS antenna tuners,” said Chris Taylor, Director - RF & Wireless Components, Strategy Analytics. “Most LTE smart phones use antenna tuning to meet OEM’s and operators’ performance targets across multiple bands, which has been a big challenge. Compared to tuners fabricated in CMOS SOI and GaAs p-HEMT technology, RF MEMS can provide substantially lower insertion loss and higher Q for better antenna performance.”
SmarTune RF MEMS antenna tuning solutions have a MIPI RFFE interface and improve the mobile user experience by reducing dropped calls, increasing the speed of data connections, and extending the battery life of mobile devices. Being able to provide LTE smartphone antenna tuners with virtually unlimited lifetime further increases the attraction of Cavendish’s SmarTune technology.
“Many OEM’s who have previously implemented antenna tuning using SOI switches are able to double the radiated performance of their LTE devices when using our low-loss RF MEMS antenna tuners,” said Lars Johnsson, Vice President Product Marketing, Cavendish Kinetics. “Passing 100 Billion cycles with zero failures has proven that our SmarTune RF MEMS antenna tuners deliver both the performance and the reliability required for large-scale adoption.”
For more information about Cavendish’s SmarTune RF MEMS solutions, visit: www.cavendish-kinetics.com.
About Cavendish Kinetics
Cavendish Kinetics is the leading provider of high-performance RF tuning solutions for mobile devices in the global wireless industry. Cavendish’s SmarTuners have been qualified beyond 100 billion cycles and are shipping in volume since 2014. Cavendish Kinetics has offices in San Jose, CA, Korea, Taiwan, China, and the Netherlands.