RF MEMS for better cell phone performance

Everyone has experienced dropped calls and choppy cell phone signals.  As cell phone manufacturers are continually looking to ensure that consumers are satisfied with their devices, WiSpry is one of the companies which is now providing components to make it easier for phone designers make their products more robust.  The company raised another $13.5 million VC round in August and is now looking to move its devices into volume production and expand its marketing efforts.  We recently spoke with WiSpry's CEO Jeff Hilbert.

MEMS Investor Journal: Can you briefly describe your products and what they do?

Jeff Hilbert: The two kinds of products which we are getting ready to sample are our tunable digital capacitor as well as a tunable matching network.  The tunable matching network is made from an array of tunable digital capacitors.  Both of these products are used in RF communication systems to improve the quality of the signal, improve power efficiency and to reduce dropped calls.

MEMS Investor Journal: Why are your products better than those of competitors and traditional approaches?

Jeff Hilbert: Our digital capacitors are MEMS-based (vs. CMOS), resulting in much better RF performance for our devices.  For example, for CMOS capacitors, Q is on the order of 15-20 at 2GHz whereas we have a minimum Q value of at least 100.   Furthermore, our capacitors are almost perfectly linear and are tunable so designers can more effectively do their job -- this is important in the cell phone industry where new models come out at a rapid pace and there is a proliferation of models.  Also, our products are made directly on the same die as CMOS and operate with a standard power supply.  So, from the system designers' perspective, they are just like any other CMOS component -- just with much better performance because the capacitors are true moving MEMS devices.

MEMS Investor Journal: What kinds of companies are your main customers?

Jeff Hilbert: We target three main kinds of customers – top tier mobile phone makers and top tier RF module and power amplifier module makers.  Right now, we expect to sell the  individual tunable digital capacitors to  the majority of our target customers first while the tunable matching network products are expected to ramp into the market a bit later.

MEMS Investor Journal: What is most compelling reason why these companies need your product?

Jeff Hilbert: The main value we provide is better signal and power performance for the cell phone end-user. Our products improve the quality of cell phone calls and our customers are very much interested in making sure that their devices result in the best end-user performance.  Also, the initial application for our products is not necessarily to replace existing components but to complement the existing hardware architecture with our devices and enable enhanced performance.  So, the risk for our initial customers to adopt our products is more limited.  We expect to eventually be in a position to work with our customers to drive the evolution of phone architectures to enable new levels of functionality and performance that would be very difficult to impossible without the benefits provided by the MEMS.

MEMS Investor Journal: What is the market potential for your products?

Jeff Hilbert: There are currently about a billion cell phones sold annually.  Out of these, we are focusing on the higher-end and 3G models.  We believe that in 2007, there will be 300-400 million of these higher-end models made.  Our process is robust and we are confident that, with higher volumes, we can be profitable while selling our devices and sub-systems for competitive market prices.  Since our process is highly compatible with CMOS, we can also consider in the future doing select licensing deals so that our components can be designed-in directly by the customer.

MEMS Investor Journal: Now that you've raised your second round of financing, what are your main objectives for the next two years?

Jeff Hilbert: Well, we are now pushing our products into production.  We are making sure that our supply chain is well prepared for scale up.  This includes our foundry partner as well as key suppliers in the assembly, packaging and test areas.  In particular, we are working with our strategic foundry partner, Jazz Semiconductor, to ramp fabrication of our devices on their 8 inch wafers to further reduce cost per die and fully integrate our MEMS devices with their RF CMOS devices at the die level.  Our expectation is that within the next two years we should be on a trajectory  to produce and sell as many as 100 million devices annually. 

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Jeff Hilbert is the president and CEO of WiSpry and a co-founder of the company.  He brings over 25 years of executive management and technical experience in a number of leading semiconductor and MEMS companies including LSI Logic, Compass Design Automation, AMCC, Motorola, Harris and Coventor. Hilbert holds a bachelor of science in chemical engineering from the University of Florida and Master of Science in computer science from Florida Institute of Technology.

Comments

[anuj goel]

respected sir,
these journals are very helpful to people connected to vlsi and mems.i am m.tech. in microelectronics and vlsi design. i am taking m.tech. six months training from centrl electronics engineering instt.,pilani(india) in mems department.

[usama]

That seems to be greet. However, also MEMS resonators/filters are of great importance due to the very high Q comparing with traditional techniques. Should i ask you sir, why did not you go through producing these MEMS devices?

Usama Zaghloul
Resarch Assistant
Electronics Research Institute, Cairo- Egypt

[Matthieu Lagouge]

One of the main benefit you claim for your switch is the co-integration with a CMOS process. But for this to be useful for your customers, you need to qualify for their foundry partners.
So is the "possibility" of later licensing the technology not rather a future requirement?

[lucky]

your investor journal is very informative