Oct 24 2007
WiSpry, Inc., the fabless semiconductor company developing low-cost, high-performance radio frequency micro-electro-mechanical systems (RF-MEMS) tunable components and modules for the wireless industry, today announced its product family of MEMS tunable digital capacitors. These products integrate low power CMOS control and voltage generation logic with an array of tunable RF-MEMS digital capacitors to provide customers with an ultra linear, digitally programmable, variable capacitance solution on a single silicon die.
To potential customers, end products using WiSpry's tunable digital capacitors will enable mobile wireless devices to implement digitally programmable matching, filtering and other critical RF functions in wireless front-end systems. WiSpry's revolutionary programmable tuning enables substantial improvements in power efficiency, potential for adaptability to multiple functions and usage environments, superior sensitivity performance, and reductions in size and product cost. The unique digital programmability of the capacitors enables the utilization of a single solution across multiple product platforms and applications dramatically reducing product development costs, time and risk. Potential applications of the tunable digital capacitors include antenna tuning, band programmable impedance matching, power amplifier tuning and tunable RF filters for mobile handsets, base stations, laptop and other portable computing devices.
"The intellectual property and technology that the WiSpry team has brought to fruition will continue to revolutionize how the design of the RF section is done for wireless appliances," said Russ Garcia, president and CEO of WiSpry. "We have led the way in development of RF-MEMS into a fabless CMOS flow, enabling the scale and yield required for competitive cost structures in high volume markets such as cellular handsets. Recently, we have developed a tunable digital capacitor (TDC) element which is the building block component for the multiple custom and standard RF product families we will introduce over the coming months. The WiSpry TDC is bringing the wireless market a level of performance at a cost structure that has not been feasible with other technologies."
WiSpry's silicon RF-MEMS technology platform addresses the major barriers to adoption of RF-MEMS technology for high volume, low cost consumer applications. WiSpry's products are fabricated on standard 200mm CMOS wafers. The Company has also developed techniques for wafer level encapsulation of RF-MEMS devices. Wafer level encapsulation or sealing is one of the key components necessary to provide low cost, high volume commercial RF-MEMS products as it allows utilization of standard low cost RF packaging techniques for RF-MEMS devices. Samples of WiSpry's digitally tunable capacitors will be available in Q2 of 2008.