Fabless MEMS chip company WiSpry Inc. (Irvine, Calif.) has inked a joint development deal with IBM Microelectronics under which IBM will manufacture its single-chip tunable radio frequency (RF) front-ends for mobile handsets, which both companies will market to tier-one original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). The first of these customers is due to be before the end of 2010.

The key to WiSpry's competitive advantage is its tunable impedance matching MEMS technology that uses arrays of switchable capacitive devices that can be quickly switched in and out to quickly provide over 3-dB of link resilience by adapting to changes in frequency, antenna conditions (such as being touched by the user) and other ongoing operational conditions, thereby preventing dropped calls and improving realtime performance — more "bars" on the cell phone display.

Today's 3G multi-mode, multi-band mobile wireless devices and tomorrow's 4G LTE terminals and infrastructure equipment both require dozens of internal RF front-end components, only a few of which are used for any one time. By going to a single tunable RF front-end, many of these redundant components can be eliminated, enabling a drastically smaller form factor as well as reducing the bill-of-materials for devices.

"We believe that tunability will be a key enabler for the future of wireless front-ends," said general manager of IBM Microelectronics, Michael Cadigan.

The WiSpry/IBM MEMS RF front-ends will be manufactured with IBM's 180-nm MEMS process which the companies claim will enable smaller, lower cost handsets that not only improve performance, but which extend by 25 percent both talk-time and Internet connectivity time. The ultimately goal of the collaboration is the development of a complete monolithic tunable RF MEMS system-on-a-chip front-end for mobile devices.

The collaborative deal was announced today (Monday, June 28, 2010), but has been ongoing for about 18 months, resulting in integrated MEMS and CMOS devices in the same package, which are already being sampled by OEMs and which will be mass produced starting in the second half of 2010.

By: DocMemory
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