That lawsuit claimed that Axiom had incorporated trade secrets acquired by an ex-employee of Silicon Labs who now sits on Axiom's technical advisory board.

"We still have to review the lawsuit and cannot comment on it directly," said Antoine Paquin, chief executive officer of Axiom, "but we're not surprised it's been filed as what we have is a clear breakthrough and is well ahead of what's been done by anyone, including Silicon Labs." In fact, he said, "the fact that they've filed a suit is flattering, it shows they're taking us seriously."

Paquin justifies his stance by describing two completely different CMOS PA design approaches that in his mind make it unlikely the lawsuit will hold water. Silicon Labs, he said, simply devised a way of distributing voltages across multiple transistors to avoid gate breakdown, but then used an LTCC substrate.

"This doesn't change the fundamental problem with CMOS," said Donald McClymont, vice president of marketing at Axiom. "In addition, LTCC is costly and no one outside the LTCC specialists themselves [such as Murata] has ever brought an LTCC process to market successfully. It's too difficult and unreliable [versus a silicon substrate]."

According to Paquin, Axiom devised a fundamentally different way of designing PAs using impedance transformers and power combiners versus Silicon Labs' traditional lumped element approach. "This allows the PA to be implemented in plain vanilla CMOS and makes ours the only [GSM] PA to date that can be completely integrated [with the rest of a CMOS radio]," he said. "We've also reduced the parts count and done the whole lot in a single package ¡ª with no discrete components," said McClymont.

Axiom is currently reviewing the suit.

By: DocMemory
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