Monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs)Updated June 26, 2008 Click here to go to our page on MMIC design Click here to go to our page on T/R modules Think of this page as the ultimate MMIC supplier guide, it gets roughly 1000 page views per month, thanks for asking! None of the companies below are paying us a dime (yet), so like Consumer Reports you know we can diss them when they deserve it. We promise we'll let you know if the Unknown Editor gets selected to be on the board of directors of some of these failing enterprises! A little history has been included for your information and entertainment here and there... The field of MMIC suppliers and foundries is ever-changing. For example, until recently the word "MMIC" pretty much meant GaAs and InP products, but now other compound semis such as silicon germanium (SiGe) and gallium nitride (GaN) now must be considered. Heck, even plain silicon CMOS has made inroads into GaAs territory! We try to stay on top of the MMIC topic, but if this page is more than three months old (see date on top right corner of the page?), all bets on its accuracy are off! Attention MMIC suppliers: send us material on your facility, and we'll post it if we feel like it, if you ask us nicely. We'd be more inclined to feel like it if you sent us a check, (we're cheap!) then we'll make you your very own MMIC page on Microwaves101, linked from a banner ad from this page, with a generous pile of your marketing material ready and waiting to bamboozle hundreds of gullible microwave engineers and buyers every day! If you see any errors in your data, or simply see something you don't like here, contact us before you get lawyered up. Are we missing a review of any major MMIC foundries or suppliers? Let us know and you could win a cool pocketknife! If any links are broken, send your complaints to webmaster@microwaves101.com. Did you know that thanks to us all, the world is running out of gallium, indium, halfnium and even zinc? Read about this nightmare here! Want to see the world's first MMIC, which is over thirty years old? Click here to go to the Microwave Hall of Fame, and meet Pengelly and Turner, who published the paper on it! Please visit our humble page on wafer processing, and check out our new page on MMIC semiconductor tradeoffs! New for February 2008! We added Gain Microwave to this page! And Jazz Semi! New for October 2007! We added the following MMIC players to this page: IMEC, Oki, and Plextek! New for September 2007! We added a link to Summit Semiconductor! New for August 2007! We've added a link to Astra Microelectronic Technologies Limited! Also new for August 2007! We welcome Auriga Measurement Systems to the MMIC world! Six-inch GaAs club: these MMIC suppliers boast six-inch processing lines: Avago, Anadigics, BAE, Filtronic, Eudyna, freescale (for sale!), GCS, Knowledge*on, Ommic, Transcom, TriQuint (Oregon only, but they boast building about a new 6" fab in Texas), and Win Semi. Nitronex if you include GaN on silicon! GaN foundry club: here we narrow the field to BAE, Cree, Eudyna/Fujitsu, Fraunhofer, freescale, HRL, Nitronex, Northrop Grumman, Oki, Raytheon, RF Micro, Rockwell and TriQuint. Let's also mention Gain Microwave, even though they use a government facility to process their parts. Plenty of other foundries have GaN on their roadmaps, so this list is expected to grow! SiGe foundry club: Jazz, IBM, and freescale all offer SiGe. So do some European fabs, which we'll list if they ever bother to contact us! Who's building a compound semi fab, who's selling and who's throwing in the towel? Building: TriQuint Texas (a rumor they continue to spread, but not confirmed in a press release). Selling: M/A-COM is being sold to Cobham, but Cobham wants to resell the M/A-COM GaAs fabs (good luck!) Recently bought fabs: RFMD bought one from Filtronic. Closing: freescale announced they have given up selling their Tempe fab and will be closing it. Boutique fab: this implies low-volume, high-mix products, as you might see at a defense contractor that uses its MMIC expertise to set it apart from its peer-group competitors. Examples: Raytheon, Northrop, BAE. Usually requires deep pockets to maintain, it is next to impossible to make money in this game. Even though we're all engineers here, in this case the word "boutique" in not a bad thing, as in your daughter spending your dough at some clip joint at the mall, a boutique fab is a good thing, because the opportunities to excel are limited only by your budget and your imagination! Pure-play foundry: offers contract fab runs, but has no microwave design capability. Example: IBM SiGe line. Fabless: opposite of pure-play, just a group of MMIC designers marketing products fabbed elsewhere. Example: Hittite. Here is a clickable index to the MMIC suppliers on this page: Aeroflex
Metelics Aeroflex
Metelics Anadigics In September 2007 Anadigics announced that they acquired the design team and intellectual property of Fairchild RF (23 employees in an office in Tyngsboro Massachusetts), an entity which had previously been sold by Raytheon to Fairchild. Astra
Microelectronic Technologies Limited We wish Astra best of luck in this business, and the rest of the MMIC world better keep looking over their shoulders! Auriga
Measurement Systems
Auriga has some very experienced
designers, including Dr. Yusuke Tajima who has numerous patents
and published papers. They sponsor a page on load-pull on Microwaves101,
check it out! Avago
Technologies New info from Nameless Insider #44... "The spin-off of Avago from Agilent didn't have much to do with instrumentation: Agilent has a 3" captive fab in Santa Rosa. It makes GaAs FETs (0.25 um), GaAs PHEMTs (0.125 um), InGaP HBTs (2 um), and recently announced production of 1 um GaAsSb/InP DHBTs (according to a talk at CSICS 2005). The 6" Avago fab in Fort Collins does produce parts for instrumentation, but I think their products were available to the mass market simultaneously. So Rohde&Schwartz could buy Agilent components made in Ft. Collins for their instrumentation, while Agilent would use more advanced Santa Rosa captive fab parts where appropriate. The Ft Collins fab was working on 6" InP (!) HBTs before the spin-off. (Incidentally, Centellex is mostly former Agilent instrumentation/circuit designers.)" We know more about what Agilent has been up, to thanks to "Nameless Insider #21!" Did you know that Agilent (Avago)has a 6 inch foundry in Fort Collins, Colorado with 4,000 wafer a month capacity that makes enhancement mode PHEMT? Enhancement mode allows you you get rid of the negative supply that you typically need on PHEMT power amps. What is Agilent doing with all of that 6 inch capacity? Mostly building power amps for CDMA and GSM, trying to satisfy some bean-counters by at least breaking even (the goal of every American GaAs foundry), and bucking the trend toward HBTs... hang in there Dudes! Here's a cool Agilent (Avago) wideband MMIC that takes advantage of their enhancement FET process. It provides up to 1 watt of power from 7 to 18 GHz, with only a single supply. Looks like individual source vias are used, another technology that separates the men from the boyz. You are seeing it here on Microwaves101 for the first time, an article will be published later this year on this device. A real scoop, as Lois Lane would have said!
Here's another tasty little MMIC with a lot of bandwidth from Agilent. This is their first new millimeter-wave catalog MMIC in a number of years, the AMC-5024 distributed amplifier (shown below, more data on the Agilent web site). This baby works DC-50 GHz, with high gain (17dB), good power (22dBm), a built in power detector, and can be had for 1/4 the cost of anything else on the market according to "NI"! Hello, does this bad boy need a negative supply? Guess it doesn't used E-FETs...
Agilent's MMIC foundry has supported their test equipment line for years, so it is a safe bet that they are players in indium phosphide technology. How else are they gonna make you a network analyzer that works up to 110 GHz? The question is, will they be able to tap into (or even invent) a consumer market in the future that will need all that bandwidth? Blue
photonics
Update on the real founder of Sanders Associates, Royden C. Sanders Jr. He passed away February 5, 2007, age 89. Here we'll shamelessly quote from his New Hampshire Telegraph obit:
Perhaps what's most remarkable about Sanders was that his previous employer was the "Lazy R Ranch!" California
Eastern Devices (CEL) Here's a picture of another successful California/Japan enterprise that began in the 1950s:
Rook! Godzirra! Celeritek Update May 2006: the Celeritek foundry (not product line) has again changed hands, it was bought from Mimix by Universal Semiconductor Technology, Inc. (USTI). Advice: if you plan on using a "Celeritek" amplifier in a new design, consider a lifetime buy, the multi-year agreement between MIMIX and USTI has to fab the old Celeritek parts might just last as long as a Britney Spears marriage. You can recognize a Celeritek part in the Mimix product line because its part number cleverly starts with a "C"! The following information should be read in the past tense... "Celeritek, in Santa Clara California, boasts a four-inch fab line processing InGaP HBTs with operational voltages to 15 volts, and 0.25um gate PHEMT with etch stop material for uniform pinch-off performance. Solid low noise epi parts, tons of gain blocks, a few MMICs that operate into Ka-band, and discrete FETs too." This info is thanks to Damian, who was once VP of marketing at Celeritek. Centellax This came in from Seann, who disagrees with our statement that "probably because no one at Centellax is over 40 years old"...
This came in from Nameless Insider #13 (think of this as an unconfirmed rumor but when you visit the Centellax web site it makes sense...)
Chelton This fabless MMIC design center is based in Richardson Texas and traces its roots back to Texas Instruments, then Remec. Their eight designers claim 200 years of experience total, it's practically a meeting of the "combover club!" They have processed designs at TriQuint, M/A-COM Roanoke, Raytheon, and Win Semi, and their designs have some novel features you won't find elsewhere (according to unnamed sources). Their specialty is compact power amplifier designs, which they employ some patented compact FET layouts. They have in-house wafer-test capability to 65 GHz. Like BAE, Chelton is an example of a British company that owns a piece (or two or three) of a former U.S. defense contractor. We're not sure how many radar front-ends Uncle Sam is going to buy from Austin Powers' countrymen in the future... good luck! Cree Cree currently offers foundry services for silicon carbide and GaN MMICs, including capacitors, resistors and backside. Don't expect to make any circuits above C-band, as gates are all done optically. Recent rumors that General Electric was going to buy Cree (to become a player in solid state lighting) seem to have been proved false. For now. Eudyna/Fujitsu Often you will see cutting edge MMIC technology papers published by authors/inventors such as Toshi Kikkawa at Compound Semiconductor Devices Laboratory, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. This is a research center (think of them as Eudyna's brothers, they are closer than cousins!), devices with commercial appeal can be transferred later to Eudyna for production. Eudyna is great example of a Japanese company that quietly kicks butt with its products. As Fujitsu, they were one of the first companies to offer millimeter-wave LNAs with noise figures less than 2 dB. Now they are offering some 60 GHz designs. Sumitomo brings a lot to the table in terms of world-class material growth capability. Bonzai! Excelics Fairchild
RF Raytheon sold off their commercial MMIC interests to Fairchild in November 2003. The two-dozen employees that were transferred have moved to their own building in Massachusetts. They took with them all of Raytheon's commercial designs for wireless products, including HBT and PHEMT product designs, plus an agreement to process GaAs wafers in Taiwan at Win Semi. Their product line includes handset and base station components, up through wideband millimeter-wave and wireless LAN components. Filtronic
Compound Semiconductors Update September 2007: the Filtronic foundry suffered a layoff of 115 workers to maintain a "cash-neutral" business model. Update February 2006: wider than expected operating losses probably had nothing to do with it, but Filtronic sacked their Mayor McCheese and a few others recently. If you're interested just search Google's news tab on the name Filtronic to read more... Not to be confused with the air filter company located at filtronics.com, Filtronic CS is a GaAs fab. Starting by buying the old Litton Solid State foundry for $49M, (Santa Clara CA), then converting an unused Fujitsu DRAM fab in Newton Aycliffe, England, Filtronic CS boasts an enormous six-inch GaAs fab line with a small product line. They are concentrating on high-volume commercial wireless applications, while developing T/R chip sets with BAE for military phased arrays, which would include frequencies of X-band through millimeterwave. The Filtronic PHEMT processes sport optically-written gates down to 0.20 micron, which allows them to build stuff up to 40 GHz. Filtronic offers foundry services to outside customers. You'll notice that Filtronic offers a number of convenient self-biased low-noise amplifier designs. However, buyer beware: we have had experiences with the LM219B, it is CONDITIONALLY STABLE and can ruin your day and reduce your next pay raise. Update 2006: someone at Filtronics sent us notice that the LM219 was "fixed", but upon examination of the new S-parameters, it ain't there yet. Nice try though! Fraunhofer
IAF Fraunhofer possesses a small
fab line, more suited for research than production. But these guys
make some really cool millimeterwave flip-chip
devices! Not many places on Earth can you buy 220 GHz MMIC products,
but Fraunhofer is one. Check out their annual
reports for the latest capabilities. freescale
semiconductor Update, February 2008: freescale was bought by an equity consortium a few years back, including the Blackstone Group. Blackstone is one of those private equity firms that takes over troubled companies and sells off bits and pieces of the original company to maximize their ROIC (return on investor capital). Look out Chrysler, now that you're owned by Cerberus Capital Management! But what's this? Blackstone floated their own IPO and is now a publically traded company, so you, too can profit from the demise of unfortunate companies they take over. Chinese investors immediately bought 10% of the BX stock. Holy cow, Batman, you don't ever want to see a Blackstone limo pull up in front of your North American wafer fab! Or in front of your fab in Scotland, freescale already sold off their two foundries there... Now that Blackstone is a "partner" at freescale, the entire GaAs product line was sold out to Skyworks in 2007, not including the wafer fab, which is now for sale. This is a very large 6 inch fab in Tempe Arizona. Best of luck to the sellers and buyers, Tempe doesn't need another Costco or WalMart, but there's little market for a compound semi fab these days unless your name is RF Micro. freescale was a spin-off of Motorola. By not capitalizing the first letter of the name, they want it to appear "friendly". They make all kinds of digital ICs, but if you have the patience, on their web site eventually you can click into their impressive lineups of LDMOS power amplifiers and InGaP HBT amplifiers. They have one of the first six-sigma-inch HBT fab lines, and also do SiGe work in house, competing with IBM and Jazz for this potentially huge market. They also have done some work on GaN, but they seem to be keeping quite about it. There's at least one IEEE paper that reports freescale GaN results. Like those of so many billion dollar companies, the Freescale web site is is a horror show of useless information! So is Motorola's site, come to think of it... they both must have applied their principles of six sigma to its design. Good luck finding freescale's pages on RF stuff, we gave up trying to link to it because the address keeps changing. Six Sigma question: which of these car companies uses six sigma: Toyota, or Ford? Answer: Ford does, Toyota never heard of it! Speaking of Moto-spinoffs, perhaps freescale will last longer than Thoughtbeam.
Global
Communication Semiconductors (GCS) Hittite FREE ADVICE!!! Attention MMIC vendors: go to Hittite's web site and see how they make sample S-parameters of most of the designs downloadable in just a few easy clicks. This is an example of how the internet is supposed to work! Now get busy and bring your site up to par, or you'll lose business each day because customers can't easily put your designs into system simulations! Hey, check it out, TriQuint also offers S-parameter downloads now, they must be listening! With Hittite recently trading at over $40 on NASDAQ, the net worth of founder Yalcin Ayasli, who holds 16,500,000 shares is now in the stratosphere! Hittite is privately owned, and one of the oldest fabless companies (founded in 1985). They are named after an obscure tribe of Indo-Europeans from Anatolia who once ruled Mesopotamia (thanks David for pointing this out!) Hittite is a major success story as a fabless MMIC supplier. With headquarters in Chelmsford Massachusetts (say "Chemsfud" if you want to be understood by natives), they process their designs primarily at TriQuint and United Monolithic Semiconductor but they usually won't tell you where your circuits were fabricated. There would be no sense telling the U.S. government that some top secret program depends on components fabricated in France, Hittite's a U.S. company, right? They offer the most substantial MMIC mixer product line in the world, it seems they have never obsoleted a single component in their history, which is not always a good thing. With the addition of the Velocium product line, Hittite products now span 0 to 85 GHz! One weird thing about Hittite is that everyone has the same phone number on their business cards, and you have to speak to a switchboard operator before you can talk to a sales guy. How's that for forward thinking? Hittite trivia: that weird looking emblem next to the name is not some kind of radar, it's the symbol an ancient sun god, who is no doubt pleased with our progress on global warming! HRL
Laboratories Since 1997 HRL Laboratories was run as a limited liability partnership between nearly-bankrupt purveyor of SUVs General Motors (which for a time owned Hughes Aircraft), Boeing and Raytheon, a love-child of the wacky mergers of the 1990s. Update December 2006: Raytheon quietly divested from the partnership, but pretty much kept this fact out of the news. About the only way you can tell that this has happened is this message from the Chairman of HRL on the HRL web site:
Funny thing about that sentence, in 2004, the LLC had three members... guess it will take a while longer to rewrite history properly. Maybe Boeing and GenMot will do the right thing and restore the proud name of Hughes Research Laboratories one of these days. HRL Laboratories is the namesake of the late Howard Robard Hughes, one of the top 100 influential 20th century Americans, who would have celebrated his 100 year birthday on Christmas Eve 2005. After WWII Howard built a formidable enterprise that employed literally tens of thousands of Ph.D. engineers in California, where they invented all manner of missiles, lasers, and other cool toys. Today HRL is about all that is left of the Hughes legacy, but in keeping with tradition, you cannot swing a dead cat without smacking a PhD engineer upside the head within their Malibu facility! HRL contains among other things the ultimate boutique MMIC foundry, with emphasis on indium phosphide and gallium nitride, especially for millimeter-wave. They make both HEMTs and HBTs. Remember it is not a production house, it's a place where records are broken with each new design, which doesn't come cheap, so bring the long green. Here's a nice chain of HRL MMICs that provides power at 300 GHz:
Some Hughes records last forever
Speaking of the Hughes legacy, until recently the HRL Laboratories web site was a treasure trove of historical technical information, but all that good stuff is gone. What happened? Rumor has it that a highly paid empty suit advised HRL to "focus on the future, not on the past". Hey guys, here's an offer you can't refuse, send some historical Hughes microwave info to Microwaves101 and we'll keep it posted as long as there's an Internet! In another disturbing development, it appears that HRL has unplugged the surf cam from their web site, which no doubt reduced site visits by more than 30 dB. IBM To paraphrase Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, "once you've had a man with no legs (or in IBM's case, no GaAs fab), you won't want anyone else". Funny thing is, IBM pulled the plug on their SiGe design group in 2002, so all they have is foundry services today. IBM seems to have named their production SiGe processes using the same rating system as Pokemon cards.... are they secretly owned by the Japanese? "5HP", "6HP" "7HP" and so on. They quote some impressive numbers for maximum frequency in the newer processes (120 GHz for 7HP), but the main attraction to SiGe technology is that it is cheaper than dirt. That is, until you add in licensing fees, masks, and design NRE. But you do get a lot of chips on an eight inch wafer. Operating SiGe at higher frequencies is a double edged sword. As emitter geometries are reduced, breakdown voltages are reduced. The 7HP collector-emitter breakdown voltage is 1.8 volts. SiGe is not going to replace front-end compound semiconductors for millimeterwave applications any time soon. Remember, you heard that here first! If you click around the IBM SiGe web site (we recommend it!) you will find a nice tutorial on how SiGe MMICs are made. IMEC Trivia question - can you name a famous Belgian? and Hercule Poirot doesn't count. Give up? How about Adophe Sax, inventor of the saxophone! Or Edward de Smedt, the inventor of asphalt! How about Leo Baekeland, inventor of Bakelite and Microwaves101 Hall-of-Famer! Infineon
Technologies Iterra
Communications (GigOptix) GigOptix is a privately owned company, so its acquisitions don't make the news. But it appears that they either licensed Raytheon's MMIC designs from Fairchild, or they are a MMIC reseller. The also offer discrete MHEMT transistors for low noise designs, but the advertised NFmins for a $15 transistor don't seem much better than super low noise PHEMTs that cost under a dollar. Thanks to Nadeem for the tip! Knowledge*on M/A-Com M/A-Com absorbed a number of foundries over the years including ITT's GaAsTek line M/A-Com is owned by Tyco Electronics (previously it was owned by Amp which got bought out). Their ex-CEO Dennis Kozlowski is serving eight years for wasting $400M on himself. M/A-Com has been a microwave company since long before it was fashionable, so they have a lot of expertise, which is evidenced by the many application notes on their web site. They also have offer an excellent paper catalog, and the woodwork is crawling with M/A-Com representatives who will buy you lunch any time. M/A-Com's foundries are in Lowell MA and Roanoke VA. One of M/A-Com's interests of late is the automotive radar field (collision-avoidance). Why anyone would want to be involved in a revenue-reduction scheme like that is beyond us. Anyway, they have been developing some impressive low-cost W-band technology, so be sure to check that out. M/A-Com's MMIC product line offers a healthy choice of amplifiers and control devices in the wireless frequency ranges, and a smattering of stuff halfway up through Ka-band. Mimix
Broadband Mimix is a fabless MMIC house. Julie Teinert, Mimix director of marketing, wants you to know this about her company (she copied it from their web site!) "Mimix Broadband, Inc., an ISO 9001-registered company, designs, develops and markets high performance monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) for microwave and millimeter-wave wireless communications applications. Mimix has assembled a team of world-class scientists that has been focused on the development of state-of-the-art millimeter-wave MMICs for the last decade. We also leverage strategic partnerships for manufacturing, in order to expedite the time-to-market cycle and meet market requirements. Backed by experienced, highly successful stakeholders, Mimix combines our design capabilities in complete communications systems with semiconductor device expertise to provide comprehensive insight in the technology and issues that its customers confront in developing products. "We offer a complete line of MMIC products from 16 to 45 GHz, including buffer amplifiers, power amplifiers, low noise amplifiers, receivers on a single chip and transmitters on a single chip. These products are well suited for millimeter-wave point-to-point radio, local multipoint distribution services (LMDS), SATCOM and VSAT applications." Here's a picture of one of Mimix's Ka-band power amps. The Lange couplers pretty much guarantee you will see an excellent output impedance match! Guess which foundry this puppy was processed at and win a cool pocket knife!!!
Microwave
Technology Inc. (MWT) Mini-Circuits On their web site you will find the "Yoni search tool". After some speculation followed by a half-hour phone call, we've been informed that "Yoni" is named after the founder's granddaughter. Where else will you learn trivia like this except Microwaves101? Mini-Circuits has a picture of one of the Microwaves101 principals held hostage on a refrigerator magnet, from MTT-S 2005 Long Beach, which we'd like to recover someday, possibly in exchange for a coffee mug. Nitronex Nitronix is planning on offering foundry services, starting in 2008. You'd think if you were gonna do GaN on silicon, you might sell eight-inch wafers and really blow away the competition. Nope, so far all they've been able to grow is four-inch after burning $56M of venture capital, and come up with the name "Sigantic", which rhymes with Titanic or Satanic, take your pick. On their web site you can visit the Orwellian-sounding "GaN education center". Northrop
Grumman Northrop has some exciting Darpa programs involving MMICs, including SMART, WBGS-2, COSMOS and others. Northrop has Trusted Foundry status with the National Security Agency. Here's an interesting little tidbit released by NG to the newswires in October 2006...
You might think that "certain microelectronic parts" might mean "MMICs", but speculation about classified programs might be dangerous for your health, so we may never know what the problem was... but it's too bad NG shareholders end up getting hosed out of $0.20 per share in profits. Good one, guys! Ommic Update June 2007! Ommic has been forging ahead on a MMIC product line, and now offers low noise amplifiers (up to Ka-band), and digital phase shifters and attenuators. Plextek
Ltd.
Prewell OKI Oki is the same company that competes with HP for printers. Raytheon
RF Components Raytheon RF Components (Andover, Massachusetts), was one of the first companies to develop MMICs, and perhaps the oldest name in MMICs, because all of the other original foundries have been bought, sold or shuttered over the years. Check out their web site for their boutique fab, it's been years since they advertised their wares. Below is some contributed material from RRFC!
Raytheon RF Components (RRFC) was founded in 1984 and today provides customers with leading-edge custom MMIC, module and multifunction solutions for defense and other performance driven applications. Their 300-person, 250,000 ft2 facility contains a 25,000 ft2 GaAs production foundry, with a Class 100 clean room, and a 9,000 ft2 research and development foundry. Raytheon provides microwave and millimeter wave solutions with operating frequencies from L to W band, output power from mw to greater than 50W, and power added efficiency exceeding 65%. Truly remarkable noise figure is possible at any frequency using the production MHEMT process. Since inception, Raytheon RF Components has provided customers with advanced technologies critical to their success, first with MESFET, followed by pHEMT, MHEMT, enhancement/depletion pHEMT for mixed RF and logic (E/D-pHEMT), and now gallium nitride. GaN investment provides a roadmap to significantly higher performance, lower cost, lighter, and smaller solutions for next generation radar, advanced communications and sensor systems. Here's solid contact information for Raytheon, if you want to see how they might help you in the field of MMICs. Tell John that the Unknown Editor sent you!
Trivia question and answer... what does the word "Raytheon" mean? Ray of the Gods! They should adopt Thundercleeze as their mascot, he seems kind of godlike and packs a pretty good pain ray!
RF
Integration Inc. RF
Micro Devices Update December 2007: RFMD's buying binge continues, this time they'll be purchasing the Filtronic GaAs fab in Ayecliff England, for the pennies-on-the-dollar sum of $25M. That moves them up the food chain toward millimeterwave devices, look for future competition here with TriQuint. Here RFMD will have one slight advantage, there are no ITAR restrictions on selling military parts overseas when those parts that are designed and fabbed overseas. Update October 2007: RFMD has announced their intention of acquiring Sirenza, it looks like this nameplate will be going away. Let's point out first that RFMD is now by far the largest fabricator of GaAs parts in the world, a remarkable position when you consider that most of their parts are fabbed in North Carolina, not in Asia! And right now they are building yet another 6 inch fab on thier home turf. RFMD is located in Greensboro NC, with a major fab center in Beijing China. Founded by Jerry Neal, Powell Semour and Bill Pratt (all are now zillionaires, maybe one of them has a homely daughter left over that you could marry...), RFMD was the first company to use HBT MMICs for power amplifiers, a move that fueled a generation of mobile phones. Jerry Neal published a book chronicalling the success of the company, we'll review it one of these days. It has the unfortunate title Fire in the Belly: Building A World-leading High-tech Company From Scratch In Tumultuous Times. As if the founders of RFMD survived the Great Depression or the Civil War or the Holocaust while inventing a computer that is built of peanut shells. Through an alliance with Jazz Semiconductor RFMD has entered the SiGe field. RFMD took over RF Nitro in 2001, a company that was working on high-power GaN stuff. RFMD comprises the largest GaAs fab in the world, processing 200,000 4" equivalents per year, according to Nameless Insider 3. RFMD has an extensive catalog of MMIC low to medium power amplifiers up to around 8 GHz, as well as chip sets for all manner of commercial wireless applications such as handsets, Bluetooth, GPS etc. They have a good web site with technical articles. An excellent paper catalog too. As they used to say during the Great Depression, enough paper to get you through green apple season! Rockwell
Scientific (now Teledyne
Scientific and Imaging LLC) Located north of 40 miles north
of El Lay California, you are looking at a three hour round trip
from the airport if you want to visit this boutique fab during working
hours. The specialty of the house is quasi-optic free-space combining
for millimeterwave circuits, which is very cool: the development
of cheap 20 to 100 watt sources for millimeterwaves has long been
one of the holy grails of microwave engineering. Teledyne has three
and four inch wafer processing capabilities, in four different III-V
flavors: GaAs, InP, GaN and InAs. They also have a process for antimonide-based
compound semiconductors (ABCS), for ultra-low power consumption
LNAs (demonstrated 1.5 mw per stage!) Teledyne is never going to
compete for cheap MMICs, but if you are looking to stretch the state
of the art, check them out. Like Agilent, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman
and BAE Systems, Teledyne no doubt would be more than happy to break
even on a good year at this research facility. Whoops, we almost
forgot to mention that Teledyne can integrate MEMS switches onto
PHEMT products. MEMS is not the "other
white meat" of microwaves, but rather, the "other
career killer". The original microwave career killer was
IMPATT diodes, as everyone knows. SiGe Mark D, Mike McP and Tony Q! We are still waiting for you to supply us a nice photo of a power amp! Shoot it in or we will tip off the INS off about your power amp design sweatshop in Methuen MA! Sirenza Sirenza used to be called "Stanford" because one of their founders used to be a waterboy for Stanford University's geek team. They lost a lawsuit, hence the name Sirenza. Now headquartered in Broomfield, Colorado, with design centers in CA, TX and AZ, they contract-manufacture a huge lineup of amplifiers up though 8 GHz. We believe that some of their amplifiers are sold to Mini-Circuits, where they are rebadged and end up in that huge fold-out advertisement we all know and love to recycle. Can't prove it though. Sirenza's product line includes a mixture of GaAs PHEMT, HFET, HBT, and more recently SiGe. If you have cable TV, chances are you have Sirenza products in your home. Skyworks Alpha trivia: about 20 years ago, Alpha was banned from participating in government contracts, because they did some funny accounting! They were ahead of their time! Hey Skyworks, congrats on winning the 2004 Mexico City "Maquiladora of the Year" award! Hope this cheers up all of your ex-employees north of the border! Summit
Semiconductor Thoughtbeam TLC
Precision Wafer Technology Toshiba If you own a Toshiba TV, VCR, or DVD payer, shame on you. Hell, why don't you just go ahead and buy gas from Exxon, who cares? Transcom TriQuint Update December 2007: TriQuint has been spreading a rumor that they are going to build a 6 inch GaAs fab in Texas, open for business by 2010, presumably to expand their military chip business. We're inclined to predict that military business in Texas is going to start suffering in February 2009, just about the time that American Airlines files Chapter 11. Good luck inviting Obama to the fab's grand opening. Spare us the rumor, let us know when you make a press release, we'll post a link to it here! There are two very different halves to the TriQuint foundry. TriQuint "Classic" runs a six -inch production line up in Beaverton Oregon, and was born from Tektronix. TriQuint Dallas, with a six-inch boutique line, was once part of Texas Instruments Defense Electronics Group which was bought by Raytheon in the late 1990's. Uncle Sam made Uncle Ray's place divest the TI GaAs foundry, for Important Reasons of National Security (it's funny where Congress has its priorities sometimes...) Say TriQuint slowly and you will see the play on words, three combined with five, which signifies III-V compound semiconductors, rating a 3.5 on the Unknown Editor's cleverity index (ten is highest). Guess they will have to change their name if they ever move into SiGe. TriQuint often hires models to "man" their booths at trade shows, adding a certain old-school charm for all of the lonely microwave dudes out there who like to meet girls from the yellow pages. We dig that leopard fur, and are glad you are between gigs, Ginger Spice!
Hey Mr. Lonely
Microwave Geekster, do you want to know more TriQuint's MMIC web site is one of the best, with a lot of data sheets and application notes and now S-parameter downloads. TriQuint's Oregon production facility is a high-volume six-inch MESFET line which offers the usual alphabet soup of wireless products for CDMA, PCS, GSM, DCS, TDMA, etc. They offer foundry services with some pretty slick Spice models for active devices, which allow you to generate S-parameters for any bias point you like. Oregon part numbers all start with "TQ", as opposed to the Texas parts which start with "TGA". TGA stands somehow for Texas Instruments gallium arsenide monolithic amplifier. "TIGAMA" presumably took up too many square millimeters of precious GaAs. TGA is a throwback label to when the TriQuint Texas GaAs Fab was part of the Texas Instruments Defense Division (thanks for the clarification, anonymous TriQuint Dude!) They started commercializing some of the GaAs products and wanted to differentiate them from other TI semiconductors like the TTL logic series. TriQuint (Texas) still uses a variety of TG labels including TGB, TGL, TGP, TGS, TGC, TGF standing for different product types (passive, attenuator/limiter, phase shifter, switch, control, and discrete FET). The TriQuint Texas boutique foundry offers a much broader mix of technologies and applications than TriQuint Oregon, spanning DC through millimeter-wave. They are also known to be dabbling in gallium nitride. TriQuint Texas offers a vertical PIN diode MMIC foundry process, which is (almost) unique in the MMIC arena (everyone else gave up on this process because it is truly a niche market). Whoops, we spoke too soon, M/A-COM now offers a similar process! When you visit TriQuint in Dallas, be sure to check out Bone Daddy's House of Smoke. It's like Hooters, but with food you will actually enjoy! United
Monolithic Semiconductor (UMS) UMS's technologies are capable of 100 GHz operation, and they are betting that automotive radar will one day pay them back for all the money they've spent on their four-inch fab line. UMS offers a lot of LNA, power amp, mixed-frequency products, with some surprisingly impressive performance. They also have gallium nitride on their roadmap. Want to know a secret? Hittite processes many of their millimeterwave MMICs in the UMS foundry! Don't tell them you heard that here! Update October 2007: perhaps Microwaves101 needs to be taken out behind the woodpile for comments about the Maginot Line, according to this fan:
Stewart brings up some excellent points from his @usa.com email address that he no-doubt typed on his Dell computer running Microsoft Windows prior to watching a Hollywood DVD. Unfortunately, like Larry Flynt, the Unknown Editor can't be fired for his lunatic rants. Speaking of Hollywood, Germany, England and France, here's three "peasants" that we all know and love, wouldn't have been a dream to have them all collaborate in a movie?
US
Monolithics Velocium Velocium's foundry was once part of TRW, which was swallowed up by Northrop Grumman. Velocium offers a lot of millimeterwave products through W-band, this is their forte. Most of the catalog items are 0.15 micron PHEMT, but they have invested heavily in indium phosphide (InP) technology for internal programs. Velocium chips are expensive for two reasons. They are processed on a three-inch fab line, and there is little competition for W-band MMICs they can charge what they want for now. In the future they will have a tough time with competitors such as UMS. Velocium is one of the first MMIC vendors to advertise chips for the new "E-band" (70 to 90 GHz). Their HEMT product line has trouble mustering 4 dB of gain per stage at 85 GHz, so don't expect double-digit efficiency power amps here. Vitesse This from Nameless Insider #44... "Vitesse has accomplished some amazing things in InP DHBTs (as participants in DARPA's TFAST program), with record published performances (at CSICS 2005). Unlike many other InP houses they really embraced DHBTs, and have what may be a very high yield, scalable technology. They're offering 300 GHz DHBTs as a foundry service. But they have some serious financial issues. I believe that their biggest revenues from InP come from making lasers as a foundry service for some partner (it was in their news), and it seems that they make most of their money in physical layer products, not from foundry. I'd bet good money that they'll axe InP soon, maybe sell to BAE (TFAST partner). Pure speculation..." WIN
Semiconductors WIN stands for "wireless information networking". Strategic alliances with companies like AWR and Plextek will help put Win Semi on the map. Two micron emitter HBT and 0.15 gate PHEMT process on six inch wafers ensures that any job up to 100 GHz can expect a production ready environment. All wafers are fabbed in an ultra-clean class 10 environment by employees that make less than the original United States minimum wage. WJ
Communications WJ is a descendent of the venerable Watkins-Johnson company, located in San Jose and Milipitas CA, with about 200 employees. They have preserved some market share in commercial telecom and RFID industries, having divested from military stuff during the 1990s (that piece of Watkins Johnson is now part of M/A-COM, and soon to be part of Cobham). WJ offers gain-block amplifiers, covering DC to 6 GHz, very similar to Mini-Circuits and RFMD's offerings, but we are pretty sure that WJ processes at least some of the parts on their own fab line. WJ offers MESFET designs (part numbers start with AG), and HBT designs too (part numbers start with AH). The cool thing about WJ is that they inherited about the best pile of microwave application notes available on the planet, so be sure to check out their web site! Xpert
Semiconductor Inc. Here's a photo of one of Xpert's six-inch GaAs wafers, which is an image of something that most MMIC companies have never seen up close (thanks to Angela!)
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