MMIC Suppliers

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Click here to go to our "where are they now" page.

Think of this page as the ultimate MMIC supplier guide. A little history has been included for your information and entertainment. So far, maybe one or two of the companies on this page have ever sponsored Microwaves101, so we can speak truth to power, unlike some other on-line microwave supplier resources...

The field of MMIC suppliers and foundries is ever-changing. For example, during the recent twentieth century 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. Even plain silicon CMOS has made inroads into GaAs territory! We try to stay on top of the MMIC topic, but if you see anything that is missing or incorrect please bring it to our attention.

Attention MMIC suppliers: send us material on your facility, and we'll post it. If you see any errors in your data, or simply see something you don't like here, please contact us. If you are nice and help us out, we might even post a link to your website.

Are we missing a review of any major MMIC foundries or suppliers? Let us know and you could win a cool pocketknife! If any information is out of date or simply needs corrections, send your complaints to webmaster@microwaves101.com.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 nearly forty 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 March 2024: we've added FALCOMM

New for December 2023: we've added SuperApex LLC

New for October 2023:We've added MMIC Works

New for August 2023: We've added Callisto Space.

New for June 2023: we've added NoleTec.

New for May 2023: we've added Gallium Semiconductor.

New for April 2023: we've added Nxbeam.

New for January 2023: we are adding this skull symbol   to all the dead nameplates on this page, so you know which companies to ignore if you are looking to buy MMICs.  Please get in touch with us if we need to add more skulls, or if we "buried someone alive".

Update January 2023: there is way more to the Tricon MMIC story that we imagined back in 2020, please take a look here.

Update January 2023: we've expanded our summary of mmTron.

Update January 2023: we added info on a sordid chapter of MACOM's history.

Update January 2023: we killed off Avago, but added its successor, Broadcom.

New for December 2022: we've added AmpliTech!

New for August 2022: we've added AGDMC!

Six-inch MMIC club: these MMIC suppliers boast six-inch processing lines: Avago, Anadigics (recently bought out and down to zero employees according to wikipedia), BAE Systems, Eudyna, GCS, Knowledge*on (Korean company, they seem to have disappeared), Ommic, Transcom, Qorvo, Skyworks and Win Semi. Nitronex (now MACOM) when you include GaN on silicon, and pSemi and Silanna when you include SOS!

GaN foundry club: here we narrow the field to BAE Systems, Cree (now Wolfspeed, whoops Infineon), Eudyna/Fujitsu, Fraunhofer, Freescale (whoops, they plowed their compound semiconductor fab into the ground in 2012), GCS, HRL, Nitronex (now MACOM), Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems and Electronic Systems), NXP, Oki, Raytheon, RF Micro (now Qorvo), Rockwell (now Teledyne) and TriQuint (again, now Qorvo). 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: Tower-Jazz, IBM (now Global Foundries), IHP and freescale (now NXP) all offer SiGe.

Silicon-on-sapphire foundry club: Peregrine and Silanna.

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, and Keysight. 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 spoiled daughter hosing away your dough 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. Examples: CMDS (whoops, they are now part of Qorvo), Engin-IC, Marki, Miller, and PRFI.  These suppliers often use off-shore fabs and package houses, yet most US military contractors don't seem to care about this. Go figure!

Here is a clickable index to the MMIC suppliers on this page:

activCirk
Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Company
Aelius Semiconductors
Aeroflex Metelics
AGDMC
Agilent 
Altum RF
AMCOM Communications
Ampleon
AmpliTech
Amp Tech
Anadigics
arQana Technologies
Arralis
Astra MTL
ATEK Midas
Atlanta Micro
Auriga Measurement Systems
Avago
BAE Systems
BeRex
Blue Photonics
Broadcom
California Eastern Laboratories
Callisto Space
Celeritek
Centellax
Cobham
Cree
Custom MMIC Design Services (CMDS)
Endwave
ENGIN-IC
Eudyna/Fujitsu
Excelics
Fairchild RF
FALCOMM
Filtronic Compound Semiconductors
Fraunhofer IAF
freescale semiconductor
Gallium Semiconductor
Gain Microwave
GigOptix
Global Communication Semiconductors
Gotmic
Guerrilla RF
Hittite
IMEC
HRL Laboratories
IBM
IHP
Infineon Technologies
iTerra Communications
Jazz Semiconductor
Keysight Technologies
Knowledge*on
M/A-COM Technology Solutions
Marki Microwave
Microsemi
Microwave Technology (MWT)
Miller MMIC
Mimix Broadband
Mini-Circuits
MMIC Works Inc.
mmTron
National Research Council Canada
Nitronex
NoleTec
Northrop Grumman
Nxbeam
NXP
Oki
Ommic
Peraso
Peregrine Semiconductor
Prewell
PRFI
qorvo
Qwave
Raytheon
Remec
RFIC Solutions
RF Integration
RF Micro Devices (rfmd)
Rockwell
Sapphicon
SiGe
Silanna Semiconductor
Sirenza
Sivers IMA
Skyworks
ST Microelectronics
Summit Semiconductor
SuperApex LLC
Teledyne Scientific and Imaging LLC
TelGaAs
Teramics
Thoughtbeam
TLC Precision
Toshiba
Transcom
Tricon MMIC
TriQuint
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)
United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC)
United Monolithic Semiconductors
US Monolithics
USI
USTI
VectraWave
Velocium
Viper RF
Viasat Advanced Microwave Products
Vitesse
Vubiq
Wilocity
WIN Semiconductor
WJ Communications
Xiamen Sanan IC
Xpert Semiconductor
Wolfspeed

activCirk
activecirk is a small business in Newbury Park, California.  They are so small they only have one product: MMIC attenuators. These MMICs are processed on GaAs and they are advertized to work to 110 GHz. Chips are priced competivitely with other solutions and available in 100 packs. Funny thing about the name, there is nothing "active" about an attenuator circuit! Here's their web site.

Advanced Wireless Semiconductor Company (AWSC)
AWSC, a pure-play foundry, has been around since 1998.  It has currently has 500 employees and 3000, 6-inch GaAs wafeers per week capacity.  Located in Taiwan, in the Tainan Science-Based Industrial Park. Thanks to Frank for pointing this out! Below is a list of their processes, from their web site.  There is no mention of gallium nitride on thier roadmap.

- InGaP / GaAs HBT
- 0.25um ED BiHEMT
- 0.5um Switch pHEMT
- 0.5um ED pHEMT
- 0.25um ED pHEMT
- 0.15um E pHEMT
- Integrated Passive Device / IPD
- Highly Integration 0.25um ED BiHEMT
- Backside Via / Backside Cu Metal Process
- Cu Pillar Bump
- Vertical-Cavity Surface-Emitting Laser / VCSEL

Aelius Semiconductors

Aelius is a fabless MMIC company in Singapore. The can supply products in chip form or in customers' choice of package.  They offer a surprising number of low noise, wideband, medium, and high-power amplifier, mixers, attenuators, phase shifter and core-chip designs. THey are related to Astra, we cribbed this from the Aelius web site:

"Aelius Semiconductors is a 100% subsidiary of Astra Microwave Products Limited, an Indian public listed company engaged in design, development and production of RF and Microwave Systems and Sub-Systems."

Aeroflex Metelics
Metelics used to be just a diode vendor, but it looks like they are moving up the food chain from PIN diodes to an HBT process. You can buy a wide variety of gain blocks up to about 6 GHz from them.

Update: we think that this business is now part of M/A-COM.

AGDMC
AGDMC is part of Amplitech, based in New York State.  This is a new business effort. The first products are super-low noise amplifiers and filters. They are hard to find on the web, for now we'll post this free link for them... Good luck!

Agilent
As of November 1, 2014, the test and measurement part of Agilent was spun off as a new company, Keysight Technologies. This includes the MMIC business.

AMCOM Communications
AMCOM is located in Gaithersburg MD and has a MMIC product line and does custom designs. They specialize in GaN amplifiers for SSPAs.

Altum RF
Altum is a fabless company in the Netherlands that offers MMICs.You do have to wonder about people that spell radar as "RADAR"... yes, it once once an acronym, but it is no longer capitalized in common usuage, unless you are SHOUTING ABOUT IT! In addition to amplifiers, phase shifters and core chips for radar bands, they show LNAs and switches for SatCom and 5G frequencies, and even an E-band power amplifier.  

Ampleon
Ampleon was a spin-off from NXP in the Netherlands, after they bought Freescale.  Ampleon products include GaN and LDMOS, mostly at S-band and below.  They have some cool Doherty amplifiers in LDMOS MMIC format.  If anyone is ever going to produce a solid-state microwave oven that is commercially successful, our bet is on Ampleon. Trivia: the first CD players were marketed back in 1980, and were developed by Philips and Sony. Phillips was the original name NXP, which stands for "Next eXPerience".

AmpliTech
This is an older company in Hauppauge, on Long Island, New York.  Long Island was once a beehive of microwave activity, perhaps dating back to Marconi's wireless stations in Babylon and Sagaponack. AmpliTech's recent foray into MMIC offerings started as a way to serve internal customers. Now they are branching out to offer MMIC catalog items, which will get a coveted free link from Microwaves101 without any form of sponsorship as we always want smaller efforts to succeed. Most of the designs at this point are filters, but they have two cool, self-biased LNA designs with sub-one-dB noise figure covering 2-4 GHz and 4-8 GHz. We expect other products shortly.  The brains behind this operation is JC, who promises to "put the fun back in RF Design". Good luck to all involved!

Amp Tech
This is a "new" GaAs and InP foundry. They bought the WJ foundry located in Milipitas California in 2007 and are now offering open foundry services (TriQuint bought the WJ product line). The play here is that somehow indium phosphide devices offer a big power amplifier efficiency advantage for handsets, but efficiency is not the only goal in consumer electronics. They can survive for a while on purchase agreements that were built into the terms of the sale, but how long will TriQuint want to build products outside of their own foundries after the agreements expire?

Anadigics
On March 16, 2016, Anadigics announced they were acquired by II-VI Incorporated for $0.85 per share (roughly $80M). This came after months of a bidding war that started when GaAs Labs tried to purchase the company for $0.35 per share in November. "Company B" was lost the competition. A more relevant description of "Company B" would have been to call then "Company C..." We project they will take their shopping elsewhere for a non-captive and cheap US compound Semi fab.  Oops, there is only one left, so that narrows it down....

Six-inch fab, HBTs for wireless applications. RFICs. Beautiful Warren NJ, in the heart of New Jersey's industrial rust belt. Power amps up to ten watts, and a very high volume GaAs fab.

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.

arQana Technologies
arQana is a fabless MMIC company headquartered in Singapore (with offices in Belgium and Taiwan) that offers GaAs and GaN MMIC products as well as custom design services... below we cribbed their own description from their web site:

arQana Technologies, established in 2014, designs and develops integrated circuits, modules, and subsystems for radio frequency, microwave, and millimeter wave applications. Our product range is comprised of amplifiers, including power amplifiers, driver amplifiers, and low noise amplifiers, along with control components, including switches, attenuators, mixers, and phase shifters, that target phased array antenna systems in RADAR, SATCOM, and TELECOM and 5G infrastructure. We invest heavily in R&D to build innovative next generation products.

Besides our standard product portfolio, we offer customized design services for targeted application. We design components that suit your needs and achieve Size, Weight, Power, and Cost (SWaP-C) advantages. We have longstanding relationships with world-class foundries, and offer highly reliable and qualified products that have been properly RF and DC tested

Arralis
Headquartered in Limerick, with a design center in Belfast, Arralis provides MMIC design services as well as module integration on the Emerald Isle, specializing in 60 to 110 GHz. Éire go Brách!

Designs up at 94 GHz are a forte. From the Arralis web site:

The Tucana MMIC and module range is the leading edge of radar chipsets. The complete MMIC range includes Power Amplifier, Low Noise Amplifier, Multiplier, Switch, Mixer & a Medium PA. Each device is available as a module.

Integrated TX and RX modules also available to customer requirements.

Astra Microelectronic Technologies Limited
Astra is a relatively new company based in Hyderabad, India. They boast 20 MMIC designers, and from what we can tell they've been quite busy. Their business play seems to be centered on defense and space products rather that telecomm, Astra offers a full compliment of X and S band T/R module MMICs, and some Ka-band parts as well. This is a fabless MMIC company, they've told us they process their parts at Win Semi.

We wish Astra best of luck in this business, and the rest of the MMIC world better keep looking over their shoulders!

ATEK Midas
This company has the Golden Touch!  In case you did not know, the legend of King Midas was born in Turkey. That is where ATEK Midas resides, with offices in Istanbul and Ankara. ATEK MIdas has a growing MMIC product selection, including switched (digital) attenuators, GaN power amps, LNAs, filters etc. They will even design custom microwave modules for you. Check them out!

Atlanta Micro
Update January 2023: Atlanta Micro became part of Mercury Systems, back in November 2021. But it looks like they are are keeping the nameplace alive for now.

Atlanta Micro Specializes in tunable filter designs, and offers a good selection of gain blocks and other useful components. There's even a tuner chipset!

Auriga Measurement Systems

Note: Auriga is now part of Focus...

Auriga has successfully executed some contract MMIC designs for clients, including:

• Transmit chip for automobile collision avoidance radar (77 GHz)
• Power amplifier for Transmit/Receive (T/R) module in X-band using InP HBTs (Pout 10W)
• Low noise amplifier for T/R module in X-band
• S-band 10W amplifiers
• S-band switches

Auriga has some very experienced designers, including Dr. Yusuke Tajima who has numerous patents and published papers.

Avago Technologies
Update January 2023: Avago bought out Broadcom back in 2015, for $37B.  Then they erased their name and stuck with the Broadcom moniker.  Funny how they use the stock ticker "AVGO" (and that stock has done quite well!)  In any case, Broadcom is likely never going to supply you with MMICs unless your name is Apple. As Rich put it, "Avago has been absorbed into Broadcom, never to be available to mere mortals again."

Avago was spun off from Agilent as a privately-held separate semiconductor company in February 2006. This $1.6B "startup" has its roots as Hewlett Packard's semiconductor products group way back in the 1960s. But please don't confuse the massive Avago foundry in Colorado with the boutique fab run by Agilent in Santa Rosa.

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 GaAs/Sb/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 Avago components made in Fort Collins for their instrumentation, while Agilent would use more advanced Santa Rosa captive fab parts where appropriate. The Fort 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 Avago has been up, to thanks to "Nameless Insider #21!" Did you know that 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 Avago 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 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!

BAE Systems
BAE runs the six-inch boutique GaAs foundry that was built by Lockheed Sanders, in Nashua NH. BAE's processes include MHEMT up to 300 GHz, and GaAs pHEMT to 120 GHz on economical six-inch wafers. They also produce GaN HEMT products up to 40 GHz on four-inch wafers. BAE routinely writes gates down to 70 nanometers and on occasion 50 nm; they have achieved power density of 300 mW/mm at 100 GHz.

The letters "BAE" officially don't stand for anything, just like "HRL", doesn't offically stand for anything (but we all know it was once Hughes Research Labs) but not that long ago the company was called British Aerospace, which acquired GEC and Marconi in 1999 to become BAE Systems. Marconi was started in 1897 by Guglielmo Marconi, the second gigantic high-tech startup success of that century following the transatlantic cable. Marconi, who appears in our Microwave Hall of Fame, got much of his financial backing from the Jameson family that his father married into, you may still enjoy their distilled spirits today. Cheers!

BAE North America is a "foreign-owned U.S. corporation" but a complete firewall between US and UK interests allows them to participate in all manner of military contracts. An example of their recent work is a decade-bandwidth distributed amplifier providing more than 10 watts across 2-20 GHz with more than 20 watts over part of that band. You can learn more about that in Decade Bandwidth 2 to 20 GHz GaN HEMT Power Amplifier MMICs in DFP and No FP Technology by Komiak, presented at the IEEE-MTTS International Microwave Symposium in 2011.

Update on the 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:

Long before it became vogue to work amid exposed brick and heavy beamed ceilings, Sanders appreciated the value of the vacant mill buildings in Nashua. Thanks to him, the Nashua mills were among the first to provide space for the innovators whose creativity would place New Hampshire at the forefront of an emerging high-tech economy. Despite its reputation as a rural haven and vacation getaway, New Hampshire always has relied heavily on manufacturing to sustain its citizens, and there was a great danger of losing that capacity if not for the vision of men like Sanders.

He was at first attracted by the available space, but soon came to appreciate the work ethic of the New Hampshire employees, who "really gave a day's work for a day's pay," he once said. His early success demonstrated what came to be known as "The New Hampshire advantage - ample space at good prices, easy access to major transportation routes, a capable and reliable work force, a pro-business tax structure, and a quality of life that made it easier to attract the best and the brightest."

Sanders' previous employer was Raytheon located in Waltham MA, where he was regarded as a "mad scientist" according to The Creative Ordeal by Otto J. Scott. Sanders was a key contributor to early missile seeker work using CW radar that evolved into the Hawk missile system that is still in use today. In 1951 he took 10 other Raytheon engineers to form his own company, "because he wanted to be free to engage in creative engineering along his own lines".

BeRex
BeRex is a MMIC company that operates from Silicon Valley California and Seoul Korea. They offer wideband amplifiers at cell phone frequencies, and surface mount Wilkinson power dividers. From their web site:

BeRex offers such advantages as ESD 4,000 volt, MSL 1, product quality uniformity, enhanced band width 10 to 4000 MHz, 100% lead-free green products (RoHS compliant), less external parts, higher performance, 100% RF/DC screen, temperature compensated bias circuit, friendly packaging, MTBF over 100 years...

Reviewing the data sheets, the amplifiers are HBT products. This further info came to us from BeRex Marketing:

BeRex, Corp. is a fabless semiconductor company which designs, produces and markets GaAs HBT RFICs and discrete transistors. With our team of experienced engineers BeRex, Corp., has successfully developed a line of highly advanced IC's for cost-effective integration into high-volume wireless applications.

We use fabs located in NorCal, Oregon, and Taiwan; product dependent.

Blue Photonics
Makers of gallium nitride substrates, including GaN on silicon and GaN on sapphire.

Broadcom
Avago bought out Broadcom back in 2015, for $37B.  Then they erased their name and stuck with the Broadcom moniker.  Funny how they use the stock ticker "AVGO" (and that stock has done quite well!)  In any case, Broadcom is likely never going to supply you with MMICs unless your name is Apple. As Rich put it, "Avago has been absorbed into Broadcom, never to be available to mere mortals again."

Avago was spun off from Agilent as a private

California Eastern Laboratories (CEL)
This company has formed a symbiotic relationship with Nippon Electric Company (NEC) way back in 1959, and it has worked well over the years. NEC produces the chips, and CEL markets them in the United States. CEL isn't just a bunch of empty-suited ex-surfers, they engineer some of the RFICs themselves. According to Dave, there is a wet-suited surfer or two onboard (forgive the pun). CEL/NEC was the first vendor to market discrete GaAs FETs thirty years ago, and they offer some great commercial GaAs and silicon RFIC products right now. There's a good chance your satellite television low noise block has a CEL/NEC super-low noise FET at the input if it's more than five years old.

Here's an image of another successful California/Japan enterprise that began in the 1950s:

Godzilla!

 

Callisto Space
Callisto Space shows just one MMIC product on their website: a K-band LNA suitable for satcom downlinks.  It is an InP design, has noise figure around 1.2 dB. They show a nice photo of the layout, it uses series feedback on all three stages and parallel feedback on stage two. Looks like a winner!

Celeritek
The entire Celeritek MMIC line has now been absorbed into the Mimix product line, since they were purchased by Mimix in June 2005.

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
Fabless purveyors of GaAs and SiGe MMICs that span up to 65 GHz, Centellax is located in Santa Rosa California. They have a great web site (probably because no one at Centellax is over 40 years old), including an app note on driving voltage-variable attenuators with an op-amp. Our one complaint about the web site is that Centellax seems to make a game out of hiding whether you are buying a SiGe or GaAs component. Dudes, some of us care about stuff like channel temperature limitations and radiation hardness, so put GaAs or SiGe in the first sentence of each datasheet please!

This came in from Seann, who disagrees with our statement that "probably because no one at Centellax is over 40 years old"...

Actually, two of the three Agilent engineers that defected from Agilent in early 2002 for Centellax in Santa Rosa were well over 40. Jerry XXX and Julio YYY are both "old geezers", the best kind of engineers. They for example were the guys who did most of HP/Agilent's bread and butter traveling wave and bandpass amplifiers back in the 90's, which were only recently discontinued when Avagotech had to split away from Agilent's captive boutique fab in favor of Winsemi for its high frequency MMIC portfolio.

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...)

Don't even think about buy MMICs from Centellax, unless you're planning to buy in bulk (1000s per order). Apparently someone bought some of their chips, repackaged them identically to one of their modules, and won a contract that Centellax wanted. Their CEO has now ruled that only strategic partners can buy bare die. They've changed the website so that you can't even get datasheets unless you already know the part number and search for it. It's a shame, 'cause they make really good devices.

Cobham
Update August 2013: you can bid for the assets of the Blackburg fab on August 7.

Update June 2013: in a few short weeks, the Blacksburg fab will close down. Best of luck to eveyone affected! Let us know when we can bid for the assets...

Update June 2012: rumors are swirling that Cobham's Blacksburg fab will be shuttered for good early in 2013. It is never a good sign when you lay off the one mask designer...

Update March 2011: the Blacksburg fab is now up and running! Cobham relocated their Roanoke fab to a location in Blacksburg VA (previously the building was part of Rohm and Haas but was part of a divestiture when R&H was acquired by Dow Chemical) - keeping most of the people employed, although times have been a little tough and there have been reductions in force. Thanks to Dan for pointing this out.

Update May 2010: the cat is out of the bag. Cobham is moving the Roanoke foundry to Blacksburg Virginia. And they have recently produced their first functional transistors on the new line.

Update March 2010: Cobham Defense Systems is the owner of the "Gaastek" foundry that was passed down from ITT to M/A-COM. It was based in Roanoke Virginia, but their lease with ITT ran out. We don't know where they moved the fab, maybe someone can clue us in! If you dig around the world wide web, you might conclude that Cobham is still interested in selling MMICs, which sport self-aligned gate GaAs MESFETs, a technology that was cutting edge about twenty years ago.

Update April 2009: rumors have it that Cobham's (M/A-COM) MMIC foundry in Roanoke will be out of business by February 2010, because ITT has opted not to renew their lease (M/A-COM has been renting space for the GaAs fab that they bought from ITT many years ago). Although there hasn't been an official press release on this topic, we've heard the story from as far away as Norway, as Cobham tells key customers that it might be prudent to place big orders now before products go obsolete. Yikes!

Cobhams' shopping spree in the US made for some interesting bed fellows. This is where Remec MMIC designs and designers ended up after Remec disintegrated. Later Cobham folded in another acquisition, M/A-COM, which was a competitor of Remec. Recall that M/A-COM was made of many parts, including the "original" M/A-COM in Massachusetts, and the west coast M/A-COM that was originally Watkins Johnson. We will speculate that these two businesses never really blended well together, even before being teamed with the Remec designers. In 2009, Cobham sold off most of the Massachusetts operation, which is reverting back to the name M/A-COM Technical Solutions. If this is confusing you, you are not alone!

Cobham Remec's 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. 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.

Cree
Update March 2018: after being denied the sale of the "Wolfspeed" carve-out of RF products to Infineon for $850M back in early 2017, Cree announced on 26 March 2018 that they turned the deal around and will be buying Infineon Technologies AG Radio Frequency Power Business for $425M.  Maybe between these two companies the dream of selling solid-state microwave ovens will finally be realized...

Cree has become a big player in the gallium nitride field, having already become the established champions of silicon carbide technology. Unlike some of the companies on this page, Cree earns money. Along with TriQuint, Cree announced the availability of GaN MMICs and foundry services at the 2008 IEEE IMS symposium in June. And you make have noticed the Cree brand when you visit Home Depot's LED lighting section.

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.

Old news:.. there was once a rumor that General Electric was going to buy Cree (to become a player in solid state lighting), but that proved false. Maybe Cree will buy GE at a fire sale one of these days!

Custom MMIC Design Services (CMDS)
It took about a nanosecond for Qorvo to absorb CMDS in February 2020 so it must have been a long-planned acquisition. CMDS data sheets are now on the Qorvo web site, and the email addresses are all @qorvo.com.  Congrats on selling for a nine-digit number!

CMDS is a small firm that began with a few ex-Hittite designers in 2006, and boasts design and test capabilities up to 67 GHz. They have a couple of microwave calculators on their web site that we think are worth checking out! CMDS keeps on expanding and hiring and bringing out new designs. One of their specialties is low current, ultra-low noise figure self-biased LNAs.

CMDS founder Paul Blount and his wife Kate have a side gig: awarding college scholarships to women in STEM.  We congratulate all involved! It is amazing to see a small company "pay it forward" in such a big way. Microwaves101 hopes to have something similar on our grave stone when the site goes dark in the 22nd century...

Endwave
Endwave was acquired by GigOptix in 2011, but many of their products are still available under the GigOptix RF/MMIC product line.

Endwave has made a play to become a fabless MMIC house, following the footsteps of Hittite and Mimix. They are churning out a wide variety of designs, which are worth your consideration.

ENGIN-IC
ENGIN-IC is a startup based in Plano TX.  Steve Nelson, veteran MMIC designer at Texas Instruments, Remec and Cobham, acts as VP and CTO. Here is their web site.  The catalog will soon fill out with T/R MMICs, time delay MMICs (such as this effort), vector modulators, and other advanced integrated circuits. Or, give them a call, get an NDA going, and have them design custom MMICs just for your program.

When you say "Engin-IC", pronounce it like it rhymes with "photogenic", don't say "engine-aye-see".  

Good luck, guys!

Eudyna/Fujitsu
In 2004 Fujitsu Compound Semiconductor formed a joint venture with Sumitomo Electric Industries, which they branded as Eudyna Devices Inc. Note: the correct pronunciation is "you-DEEN-a", don't be a Rube and say "you-DINE-a".) They carry a lineup of MMICs up through V-band, but their papers at recent IEEE MTT-S Symposiums show that they have been very, very busy on the problems associated with gallium nitride devices. Eudyna was the very first company to offer GaN devices commercially, and they did it all without help from Daddy Warbucks, unlike the major US GaN players.

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 millimeterwave 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
Alas, Excelics is no more. This privately held company quietly went out of business back in February 2011. The sharks are circling, look for other companies to offer data sheets cross-referenced to Excelics part numbers... thanks to David for pointing this out!

Sunnyvale California. Four-inch fab. Mostly discrete devices, but a small product line of MMICs.

Fairchild RF
Fairchild RF is no more, since September 2007 Fairchild sold off their RF hobby shop to Anadigics.

Raytheon sold off their commercial MMIC interests to Fairchild in November 2003. The two-dozen employees that were transferred 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 included handset and base station components, wideband, millimeterwave and wireless LAN components.

FALCOMM
FALCOMM is a relatively new startup (2021?) with what appears to be some healthy financing. They were one of the Gold sponsors of GOMACTech 2024.  It does not look like they have any products as of March 2024.  Here is a paragraph we cribbed from their website:

Falcomm is a fabless semiconductor company that reinvented the power amplifier with our patented ultra-efficient Dual-Drive™ technology. Our silicon-proven Dual-Drive™ power amplifier demonstrates world record energy efficiency and enhanced linearity that supports Gb/s modulated signals with high spectral efficiency for the wireless communication market using half the silicon area of commercially available Doherty amplifiers.

Good luck to all involved!

Filtronic Compound Semiconductors
Filtronic's product line has now been folded in with RFMD's products. If any designs still exist they as buried somewhere in Qorvo's catalog.

Update December 2007: Filtronic announced that it intends to sell its entire MMIC compound semiconductor operation to RFMD for the fire-sale price of $25M. That's better than nothing, which is where the negotiations started. Thus the final British company has thrown in the towel on GaAs fabs.

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...

Fraunhofer IAF
From their web site: The "Fraunhofer-Institut für Angewandte Festkörperphysik" or Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid-State Physics - IAF in short - is a leading research center in the field of III-V-compound semiconductors and their applications in micro-, nano- and optoelectronics."

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
freescale is now part of NXP.

Update May 2010: freescale announced they are back in the MMIC business. It's a lot simpler now that they don't have to pay the electric bill for a fab. We'll venture a guess that the new freescale MMICs are being fabbed in Taiwan. Where else can you make a good power amp for less than a buck?

Update May 2008: it's all over for freescale as a MMIC supplier. freescale has announced that they will be shuttering the Tempe GaAs fab.

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 publicly 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 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.

Gain Microwave
A privately held company in Ottawa, Canada, home of that two-four of Blue that you can't purchase in Tucson. They design and supply GaN MMICs which are processed at the National Research Council of Canada. Bet you didn't think of Canada as supplier of GaN! Incorporated in 2003, they already are supported by contract Loonies, not investor capital. We wish them the best of luck!

Here's an image of very compact SPDT series/shunt switch prototype from Gain Microwave. It uses 0.8 um gate GaN HEMT technology on a thick silicon carbide substrate with CPW transmission lines. The RF common port is to the south, the probe on the north side is supplying switch voltages. Loss at 10 GHz was measured at 1.85 dB, power handling hasn't been completely characterized yet, but it will be measured in watts, not milliwatts!

Gallium Semiconductor
Gallium Semiconductor is a fabless company headquartered in Singapore (with R&D in Nijmegen, and Applications Lab in Singapore, Nijmegen, and Shanghai) that offers high power RF GaN amplifiers for telecom and multi-markets. It was founded in 2021 by Gaas Labs. They have a multi-source strategy and have a dedicated manufacturing line in the Philippines. They recently released a library of nonlinear models for their portfolio of GaN products, consisting of over 22 models covering all of Gallium Semi’s broadband Dual Flat No-Leads (DFN) plastic and Air Cavity Ceramic (ACC) packaged products. All models are designed and validated with broadband S-parameters and load pull measurements to cover a broad range of applications. They claim to have the world's leading high power GaN radar performance in the L/S band and unmatched high-power performance in compact plastic packaging. Thanks to Jack for pointing us to them!

 

GigOptix
GigOptix acquired Endwave in 2011.

iTerra changed their name to GigOptix in 2007. This blurb came to us from their corporate communications manager:

GigOptix is a leading fabless supplier of semiconductor and optical components that enable high-speed information streaming and address emerging high-growth opportunities in the communications, industrial, defense and avionics industries. The Company offers a broad portfolio of high performance MMIC solutions that enable next generation wireless microwave systems up to 90 GHz and drivers, TIAs (trans-impedance amplifiers) and TFPS^TM (thin film polymer on silicon) optical modulators for 40G and 100G fiber-optic telecommunications and data-communications networks. GigOptix also offers a wide range of digital and mixed-signal ASIC solutions and enables product lifetime extension through its GigOptix Sunset Rescue Program.

As for MMICs, GigOptix offers limiting amps, and wideband distributed amplifiers, fixed attenuators and more.

Global Communication Semiconductors (GCS)
GCS is a pure-play GaAs foundry in Torrence, California. Their InGaP and InP HBT processes are state-of-the-art.  They offer a 0.25 micron optical PHEMT process, and they offer shared mask opportunities for microwave cheapskates. They also have GaN technology down to 0.25 micron, and SAW capability.

You can view the GCS web site in Chinese... could they be looking for new owners?

Gotmic
Short for "Goteburg Microwave Integrated Circuits", Gotmic plans to become a competitor in millimeterwave ICs, with designs spanning 10 to 120 GHz, and highly integrated MMICs their specialty. Gotmic is a spin-off company from Chalmers University of Technology, Microwave Electronics Laboratory, in Sweden. Looks like their products are all 100 um thick GaAs pHEMT, there is no way to tell what fab they are processed at. Good luck!!!

Guerrilla RF
Guerrilla has a fair number of MMIC designs, mostly sub-6 GHz.  If you are interested in X or Ku-band, look for "high frequency" under their products tab. here is a blurb we quote from their web site:

Guerrilla RF, headquartered in Greensboro, NC, provides high performance Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits (MMICs) for the automotive, 5G infrastructure, and cellular booster markets. Since our inception, we have dedicated ourselves to the development of innovative, industry leading MMICs that enable equipment manufacturers to provide greater coverage area and higher data rates.

Does their location mean they are populated with ex-RFMD people? 

Hittite
Update July 2014: Hittite was bought out by Analog Devices Incorporated (ADI) of Norwood Massachusetts. ADI is a much larger company and did not compete (until now) in the MMIC world. Good luck to all!

Update September 2011: Up until now, Hittite has enjoyed the highest profit margins in the MMIC industry. But TriQuint recently informed them they are closing their fab to commercial fabless companies that compete with them. Maybe they are sick of seeing Hittite's market cap at $1.6B with TriQuint $1.0B while they do all the heavy lifting. See page 11 of Hittite's recent SEC filing:

http://www.hittite.com/content/documents/HITT_2011_Q2_10Q.pdf

Hittite has more than three and a half years to make the transition. Now the fun begins, hundreds of designs have to be ported over to other fabs and bugs worked out. It's long term employment for all Hittite designers!

Update October 2007: Northrop has come to an interesting agreement with Hittite, the entire Velocium product line has been transferred to Hittite. This is good news for both companies, no one markets MMICs better than Hittite.

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 US government that some top secret program depends on components fabricated in France, Hittite's a US 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!

Hittite has an amplifier in our rogues gallery of conditionally stable amplifiers.

HRL Laboratories
You'd think that HRL stands for "Hughes Research Laboratories", but it officially doesn't. This is because when Raytheon bought out Hughes Aircraft in the 1990s they went out of their way to erase the name "Hughes" everywhere that they could. Why? Because the two companies pretty much hated each other as competitors. In 1996 Hughes employee Khai Xuan Le drove coast to coast to murder Raytheon employee Sang T. Lam! OK, it was over a girl, but this story says a lot about the atmosphere of the times. Legend has it in 1997 Raytheon tried to rename Hughes Access Road at their acquired Tucson factory, but the town told them to pound sand. No doubt they would have renamed the Hughes Federal Credit Union which shares the Raytheon Tucson driveway, too bad you can't rename what you don't own!

Check out our male model wearing an HRL shirt he picked up at GomacTech 2016. Next time you meet him and he is wearing this shirt, ask him to tell you the story of the first W-band GaN MMIC but first you must provide him with a micro-brewed IPA. Here are some hints: it involved HRL. Raytheon, and the Unknown Editor, and it ended up in corporate divorce court!

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:

"I am pleased to include this personal message on HRL's web site. In 2004, my first year as HRL's Board Chairman, I came to recognize the potential value that HRL offers to each LLC Member - Boeing and General Motors."

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 millimeterwave 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

IBM sold out their wafer fabs to GlobalFoundries back in 2015.  GF is owned by the Emirate of Dubai but is a "US company". You can only own so many racehorses...

IBM (was) the biggest player in SiGe. Their pure-play fab line in Burlington Vermont sets all of the standards for this technology, and is used by a worldwide army of companies. They are so big they have their own bridge across a real river!

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.

IHP
This information came from Maurizio at IHP (thanks!)

IHP used to be  an acronym for “Institut für Halbleiter Physik” (Institute for Semiconductor Physics) from former GDR (“East Germany” before reunification). We are basically located in the “Silicon Valley” of former East Germany.

Now the acronym stands for “Innovations for High Performance” microelectronics.

We are the “Leibniz-Institut” for innovative microelectronics. We are not related to Fraunhofer but we of course cooperate and have joint projects together.

Just briefly:

Our processes are on 250nm and 130nm technology node and offer SiGe BiCMOS technologies and provide very high frequency HBTs with cut-off frequencies up to 500 GHz and integrated LDMOS devices with breakdown voltages of up to 22 V, including complementary devices. We also have useful integrated MEMS for frequencies above 30 GHz. All wafers are 200mm diameter.

We are strong in MPW (multi-project wafer, where more customers join and split the mask costs) runs allowing for cost-effective prototyping and we can also give Engineering Runs for low volume applications.

IMEC
IMEC is European consortium that performs research in micro and nano electronics.

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
Update March 2018: Infineon's Radio Frequqney Power Division is being picked up by Cree.

Infineon has repositioned itself from a large GaAs fab to a large SiGe fab house. Good luck finding what you want on their web site.

iTerra Communications
Update October 2007: iTerra has changed their name to GigOptix.

Jazz Semiconductor (Tower Jazz)
Pure-play fab, headquarters is in Israel, with eight inch fab in Newport Beach California (once Rockwell) amd San Antonio Texas (once Maxim). The Newport facility does the RF stuff including BiCMOS and MEMS.

Update November 2008: Jazz merged with Tower Semiconductor.

Jazz offers eight-inch (200mm) CMOS and SiGe BiCMOS foundry, in similar nodes to IBM, down to 0.13 micron.

The very first thing you need to know about jazz, is that there is NO TALKING ALLOWED during a stand-up bass solo.

Shhhhhh....

Keysight Technologies
Question... who won the Keysight minibike at the 2019 IMS exhibit?

Update 2018: Keysight has bounced back from the October 2017 fires, replacing 37,000 ceiling tiles and 1200 cubicles among other things. A great example of a company with a great attitude and great employees. Bravo!

Formerly the test-equipment part of part of Agilent , Keysight Technologies maintains a fab in Santa Rosa, Cali, which is called the "High Frequency Technology Center". This fab and its product line have sometimes been confused with Avago, because Avago also spun out of Agilent a few years back. Years ago, the company was called Hewlett Packard, a name that continues as a computer hardware brand.

Keysight Technologies continues with a three-inch line for both GaAs & InP. Many of the products are developed specifically for test equipment, so "wideband" is the theme. How else are you going to cram all the features into a 10 MHz to 67 GHz VNA that fits on a desktop? The good news is that Keysight sells some of their IC designs. (This really isn't "news"... they have been selling the HMMC line since the '80s). New for November 2018! Scott sent us an update on the Keysight offerings, quoted below.  Thanks!

Keysight’s fab produces both Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) based and Indium Phosphide InP based MMICs on 3-inch substrates.  We really like InP Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors (HBTs) because of their ultra wide bandwidths, high frequency operation, AND larger break-down voltage (relative to other technologies such as SiGe).  This extra voltage gives another approximately 10dB of dynamic range at the top of the power scale.  InP is a key reason the company has been able to capture the #1 position in high performance oscilloscopes after decades of being #2 in the market.

Although most of our fab capacity goes towards supplying MMICs to our internal development and manufacturing teams for use in leading edge T&M equipment, we have always sold, and continue to sell a portion of our MMIC portfolio externally. 

In addition to offering some MMICs to the external market, we will also serve as a foundry given the right business opportunity.  This can give a company access to some screaming fast InP HBT technology, amongst other things. 

*Quick history: Avago (now Broadcom) split from Agilent (now Keysight), but retained the rights to some MMIC designs.  As such, Broadcom and Keysight were making the same part design in different fabs and both were offered externally.  A partial mapping of parts is below:

Keysight Part Number	Avago Part Number	Description
HMMC-5023	AMMC-5023	21-30 GHz LNA
HMMC-5025	AMMC-5025	2-50 GHz Distributed Amp
HMMC-5026	AMMC-5026	2-26.5 GHz TWA
HMMC-5033	AMMC-5033	17.7-32 GHz Power Amp
HMMC-5040	AMMC-5040	20-44 GHz High Gain Amp
HMMC-5618	AMMC-5618	6-20 GHz Medium Power Amp
HMMC-5620	AMMC-5620	6-20 GHz High Gain Amp

Knowledge*on
Seems to have disappeared.

MACOM Tech
Update January 2023: Back in 2018, Analog Devices sued MACOM Technologies when three former Analog employees were caught red-handed moving 500 GB of stolen data to their future employer (MACOM). We won't name them here but you can go back and click that link to satisfy your curiosity.  Indeed, the CEO of MACOM at the time, John Crouteau, was also once an Analog employee, and stated in an earnings call in 2016 that they were hungry to regain market share from Analog and other RF companies. The lawsuit eventually was dropped in 2018, for reasons we may never know.  In 2019, MACOM announced that Crouteau had resigned and replaced by Stephen Daly.  and "thanked Crouteau for his many years of service".  Daly was once president of Hittite, stepping down in 2013 well before their acquisition by Analog Devices. It appears that two of the three accused MACOM employees still work there, if you look up their names on LinkedIn. John Crouteau may also be available for hire...

Additional update: MACOM is partnered with STMicroelectronics back in 2018 in producing GaN-on-silicon for RF devices. MACOM got its start in GaN-on-silcon by acquiring Nitronex back in 2014, for teh fire-sale price of $25M

Update June 2019: M/A-COM announced that they laid off 250 employees.  

M/A-COM Tech launched an IPO in March 2012, in the last month the stock price has held between twenty and twenty-two bucks on NASDAQ (MTSI) with market cap around $900M.

Could TriQuint's decision, announced in 2011, not to process Hittite wafers after June 2015 also mark the end of an agreement with M/A-COM-MIMIX? Maybe someone inside could confirm that for us...

Privately held Technology Solutions M/A-COM announced in 2010 that it is acquiring MIMIX Broadband.

Late in 2009, Cobham sold off part of their recent acquisition from Tyco. The result is that the "original" M/A-COM is now an independent business, and this venerable nameplate from the 1950s survives. The company is now called M/A-COM Technology Solutions, and is presumably headquartered in Lowell Massachusetts.

M/A-COM offers an interesting mixture of circuits and technologies. Some of their designs might date back to the 1970s, and most if not all of the military product base stayed at Cobham. But with new ownership and some key players rejoining the team, it is worth keeping an eye on their future products. They still have a great PIN diode MMIC process which is a legitimate money-making niche, and then there's that "HMIC" process that builds glass circuits on silicon. Maybe they can get Dennis Kozlowski out of the slammer to run the show!

The remnants of M/A-COM's GaAs business were sold to John Ocampo for $90M on March 31, 2009 (there has been a press release on this), and this company is now called M/A-COM Technology Solutions. In hindsight, this was predictable, new owners usually aren't interested in maintaining non-profitable businesses. Ocampo's company is GaAs Labs LLC, and he serves as chairman of the board for Mimix Broadband, a private company where he has made some big investments. He made his original money selling Sirenza (where he was a founder) to RF Micro back in 2007 when this type of business in North America was actually worth more than zero. Good luck to all! Maybe Ocampo should consider changing the name of his investment firm, "GaAs Labs" sounds like the Packard automobile! The future of compound semis is far more diverse than just two elements on the periodic chart. Ocamo is also a big partner in Mimix, and is chairman of their board.

Official as of 2008,  Tyco has sold M/A-COM to Cobham plc. The part of M/A-COM that provided MMICs is now known as Cobham M/A-COM RF and Microwave Components.

The fun of consolidation will soon begin! In their press release they mention that M/A-COM's capabilities will be combined with the Remec business that Cobham acquired a few years back. The hose is being connected to the tailpipe, it's just a question of which stray dogs get adopted and which ones go to their reward...

In May 2008, M/A-COM's parent Tyco announced their intent to sell M/A-COM to Cobham plc, a British company, for $425M. The new owners have (sort of) announced that they will be shedding the foundries (they used to have one in the UK so they are familiar with negative ROIC), but the problem is that no one is going to want any of that. If you picked M/A-COM's Roanoke foundry in the compound semi death pool, you're looking good! M/A-COM fab employees, please send us some resumes....

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.

Marki Microwave
Most people are familiar with Marki's mixer and multiplier products. They have a substantial MMIC product line, which of course includes mixers and multipiers, but they also offer amplifiers (you're gong to need one to drive the LO on that mixer), filters, equalizers, and even hybrid couplers. Marki is a fabless MMIC company.

Learn more about the company that Ferenc Marki started in 1991, over at EEWeb.

Thanks to Justin for adding Marki to our list!

Microsemi
Microsemi has developed a product line that includes SiC. This was done through acquistitions as well as step-out growth. They offer a variety of discrete transistors as well as CMOS switches up to 8x16 in crosspoint configuration. VT Silicon (of Atlanta) was one of the aquisitions (2010) that put Microsemi into silicon germanium products.

Microwave Technology Inc. (MwT)
This info came from their web site (but we had to spell check it):

Located in California's Silicon Valley, MicroWave Technology, Inc. (MwT) was founded in 1982 by technical principals with broad experience in Gallium Arsenide (GaAs) device design and fabrication. With a factory occupying 35,000 square foot, the Company's principal assets include both its GaAs semiconductor fab and a hybrid chip and wire microwave integrated circuit (HMIC) manufacturing facility. The vertical manufacturing and product strength provide MwT uncommon flexibility and opportunity in the microwave component marketplace.

Miller MMIC
Miller offers a wide portfolio of chip designs, including some passives such as couplers and equalizers.  Their address is in Dallas Texas.

On an unrelated "note", Bill Backer, one of the original Mad Men in the Golden Age of Advertising, died in May 2016.  You probably don't know him, but you know his work when you hear it...

If you've got the time....we've got the MMICs

Mimix Broadband
Update May 2010: Privately-held M/A-COM Technology Solutions acquired acquiring MIMIX Broadband.

Update May 2006: MIMIX sold off the fab house that was once Celeritek, to Universal Semiconductor Technology, Inc. (USTI).

Mimix is a fabless MMIC house. Julie Teinert, Mimix director of marketing, wants you to know this about her company:

Mimix Broadband, Inc. supplies high performance gallium arsenide (GaAs) semiconductors from DC to 50 GHz for microwave and millimeter-wave applications. Mimix has offices in Houston, Sydney, Belfast and Hsinchu, and offers a unique combination of semiconductor design expertise and communications systems background to develop state-of-the-art microwave and millimeterwave semiconductors. Mimix markets a highly diversified product line that serves the top tier telecom, satellite and defense companies worldwide.

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!!!

 

Mini-Circuits
Harvey Kaylie, founder of Mini-Circuits, died on 30 May 2018 at the age of 80.  He was an extremely successful entrepreur, businessman and philanthropist.

Minicircuits of Brooklyn New York is well known as the biggest advertiser in the entire microwave industry. They offer a variety of plastic-packaged MMICs (cheap!), mostly HBT efforts. We're not sure where these chips are processed or designed (M-C is fabless), but we're sure that Mini-Circuits does not have semiconductor fabrication capability. They offer "high-directivity" MMICs, and we have a page to explain what that means.

Mini-circuits has made a product line out of reflectionless filters, fabricated as MMICs.

Mini-Circuits has an amplifier in our rogues gallery of conditionally stable amplifiers.

MMIC Works Inc
New for October 2023: here's a mysterious new company that appeared in a Google search.  They have a three-page Go-Daddy website (MMICWorks.com) that shows no data except that the company is located in New Hampshire.  But a quick inquiry was answered fast. This company was founded by John Mahon, who has considerable design experience from working at Marki, Qorvo, Custom MMIC and ADI. MMIC Works' play is to become a MMIC design service company, in GaAs, GaN, InP and InGaP at frequencies to 150 GHz. Good luck!

mmTron
mmTron is a startup from 2020, headquartered in Redwood City CA (right between San Francisco and San Jose), focusing on 5G, SATCOM and even 6G.  Lately, they have been on the move...  In December 2022, they hired one of the best power amplifier designers on the planet.  Dr. Mike Rioberg was the recipient of the MTT-S  Outstanding Young Engineer award for 2021 when he worked at Qorvo, you can get to know him in the video below., produced by Microwave Jounal, with Gary Lerude as the interviewer.

Microwave Journal's interview with Michael Roberg, 2021 IEEE MTT-S Outstanding Young Engineer Award

mmTron still has a lot of open positions... Meanwhile, mmTron has been building out a catalog of GaN power amplifiers and other circuits.  Here is a link to their growing list.  Even Qorvo would be jealous of the power levels and frequency bands that are offered!  However, you will likely need to sign an NDA with them to get any data.

Under no circumstances should you associate mmTron with the Hanson song, MMMBop...

Hanson,MMMBop

National Research Council Canada

This link to Canada's pure-play GaN fab was provided by Brian:

https://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/solutions/advisory/foundry_gan.html

From the NRC web site (where you might find Brian's contact info):

"NRC’s GaN Electronics initiative is helping to establish a strong industrial GaN manufacturing capability for Canadians by offering its semiconductor foundry services to key industry players."

Nitronex

Update 2019: whatever DNA of Nitronex that is left resides in MACOM Tech where they offer GaN-on-silicon high-power HEMTs.

Update June 2014: Nitronex has left the building...

Update July 2013: startup Nuvotronics has taken over most of the Nitronex Durham facility.

Update June 2012: Nitronex announced that they have been acquired by GaAs Labs. GaAs Labs is a private investment company owned by John Ocampo, who put together the MIMIX-M/A-COM merger now known as M/A-COM Technology Solutions which went public earlier in the year. This is just a few months after Nitronex sold a license to GCS for their GaN-on-silicon process. Terms of either deal were not disclosed, however, it the odds are that the original Nitronex investors took a serious haircut.

Nitronex is a developer of patented GaN on silicon technology. The trade space here is potentially lower cost, but lower performance than GaN on silicon carbide. Why lower performance? Silicon isn't really a MMIC substrate owing to its high conductivity, and its thermal conductivity is much lower which reduces the output power density.

Nitronex 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".

NoleTec
NoleTec is a fabless European company that purports to use the "best performing gallium nitride technologies processes in the world" to offer 50-ohm-matched high-power amplifiers down at L, S and C-band.   Power up to 280 watts is offered.  You have to look on MRC GigaComp's web site to learn anything about these offerings, which seems kind of weird. The attraction to  NoleTec is that their parts are "ITAR-free", since the come from Europe.

Northrop Grumman
What's the difference between Northrop Grumman's east coast and west coast fabs? On the east coast at Linthicum, Maryland, the fab cranks out MMICs for high-power radar TR modules, and should be swamped with work soon since the NG's SABR radar was chosen by Lockheed (at the expense of Raytheon) for the F-16 upgrade. The west coast group at Redondo Beach in California pushes frequency/power/thermal boundaries with many research grants from Darpa over the years. They are back in the business of selling MMICs commercially to SSPA provides, including 10 watt GaN amplifiers at Ku and Q-band (which might be covered by ITAR), and W-band GaAs pHEMT amplifiers, and modules up to THz.

Here's an important distinction: the closest "good" beach to Linthicum is Ocean City, is not mentioned in Surfing USA, but Redondo is. How many of these beaches have you been to, Surfette?

Surfin' USA

You'd catch 'em surfin' at Del Mar
Ventura county line
Santa Cruz and Trestle (part of San Onofre Beach)
Australia's Narrabeen (say, that's not in the USA!)
All over Manhattan
And down Doheny way...

...........................

Haggerties and Swamies
Pacific Palisades
San Onofre (site of a [hooray] decommissioned nuke plant) and Sunset
Redondo Beach L. A.
All over La Jolla
At Wa'imea Bay...

Genius comes in many flavors, in this case it is pudgy, wears stripes and plays bass.
Learn to recognize it... yet this is not a great original example as Surfin USA was derived from the work of an earlier musical genius who was later credited for both works: Chuck Berry's Sweet Little Sixteen. In any case, sit back and watch your parents cut loose! Yes, we digress....

Until October 2007, NG marketed MMICs fabricated in their west coast fab under the brand Velocium, but that name is now history as Hittite has taken over this product line.

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.

Nxbeam
Nxbeam is a startup that seems to have some momentum behind it. They already offer an extensive lineup of power amplifiers for SatCom, including the elusive 50 GHz uplink band that so far seems to have no competition from Qorvo or Wolfspeed.  The also offer some power amplifier modules for Ku and Ka-band.  Good luck to Nxbeam!

NXP Semiconductors
NXP is an independent, publicly-traded company in Eindhoven, Netherlands, the city where Philips was founded in 1891 (making lightbulbs).  NXP spun off of Philips in 2006, and merged with freescale in 2015.  Borrowing directly from Wikipedia, "NXP provides technology solutions targeting the automotive, industrial, IoT, mobile, and communication infrastructure markets".  NXP stands for Next eXPerience".  As of 2021 they sold $11B in semiconductor products and are close to being in the top ten semiconductor manufacturers in the world. They use silicon for their RFIC designs but it is hard to tell what flavor from their website. They do offer gallium nitride power amplifiers. the grand opening of the GaN fab (in Chander AZ) was held in 2020; they process six-inch SiC wafers and focus on the 5G base-station market. It does not appear that they offer an open foundry service.  We'd like to hear about NXP from people that are familiar with them.

You have to spend some time on their website to find what RFIC products they offer, that's usually a sign that a company is only interested in big contracts.  But you will find transmit and receive circuits for LTE and 5G applications... and even 27-30 GHz phased array beamformers.

OKI
Founded in 1881 by telecom pioneer Kibataro Oki, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. is Japan's first telecommunications manufacturer and is headquartered in Tokyo. They have strong research capabilities in GaAs and GaN technologies, according to press releases they have achieved 115 GHz Fmax for a GaN HEMT on silicon. They also offer GaAs HEMT technology with gate lengths at 0.15 microns.

Oki is the same company that competes with HP for printers.

Ommic
Update December 2023: The Financial Review has a long article describing transactions between Ommic and Russia, which went on for years. It is maybe a fifteen minute read, take a look here. Sorry if you get git with a paywall before you read the entire article, you might also look on for the article on Financial Times.  If you don't manage a free read and you don't want to pay, just ask us for a summary. Unlike China, Russia has no designs on building up their own infrastructure for advanced chips like GaN MMICs.  They source needed components the old-fashioned way using an intelligence operation, cash, women, and a string of pop-up shell companies. In the case of Ommic's chips, this included an intermediary in Ireland.  Thanks to MMICs illegally obtained from Ommic, Putin's army has better electronic warfare capabilities to deploy in Ukraine. This happened in spite of EU sanctions against Russia dating back to 2014 annexation of Crimea. Sanctions only work when businesses do the right thing, even if it means passing up on some needed cash. You can bet this is not some isolated event, it liteally happens all the time.

Update September 2023: in July 2023, France arrested four people after Ommic was accused of illegally exporting technology to China and Russia. Apparently this is related to a Chinese national buying up 94% of Ommic back in 2018 and installing himself as Chairman of the company.  There is no reason to believe that MACOM has any legal exposure after buying Ommic. We will see how this plays out in court...

Update April 2023: Ommic has entered an agreement to sell out to MACOM for €38.5 million, as announced in February 2023. The deal is set to close later this year.

The clever name for the Philips GaAs foundry, somewhere near Paris France. No, we didn't misspell "Ohmic", they did. They have a six-inch fab line (but apparently rely on the three-inch line for production), and have some advanced capabilities including E-mode transistors, InP double heterostructure DHBT to 300 GHz, and pHEMT and MHEMT with gates down to 70 nanometers. This is world class stuff.

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.

Peraso

Peregrine Semiconductor
Peregrine Semi is the only source of RFICs processed on silicon-on-sapphire. SOS technology has been around since the 1960s, and removes the biggest limitation of silicon RFICs: sapphire has no loss due to substrate conductivity. We need to add a page on SOS one of these days!

Peregrine offers switches made on silicon that can compete with their GaAs counterparts. They also offer digital step attenuators, prescalers and phase-locked loops.

Prewell
Prewell is a Korean RFIC company that sells PHEMT and HBT chips that they manufacture. Nothing spectacular, just low noise, medium power and gain block amplifiers up to about 3 GHz in packages.

PRFI
PRFI (formerly Plextek RF Integration) was formed from the MMIC design team of Plextek Ltd, and became a separate line of business in November 2012 (see press release.) Liam Devlin is CEO of PRFI.

Here is a link to design tutorials presented by PRFI on Youtube, which include phase shifter RMS calculations, mixer design, switch design, broadband amplifiers, baluns, calibrations and more. Five star rating, Liam and the PRFI team are sure to win a Webby!

http://www.youtube.com/channel/UClZFUtAnlLZK6FrMQ1yPV2Q

PRFI is a consulting company near Cambridge, in the UK. They have considerable MMIC design expertise (perhaps some ex-Bookham designers?) and to date have developed over 90 full custom GaAs MMICs. WIN Semi has announced that PRFI is their official design house. If you work in a US company, hiring a British company to design into a Chinese semiconductor foundry and may have ITAR implications. In addition to WIN, PRFI has used wafer fabs at TriQuint, GCS and Bookham (when Bookham was alive) according to Liam Devlin, a good friend and frequent contributor to Microwaves101. Think of PRFI as the Morgan Motors of MMIC design! Here's an example of one of their designs, we'll try to dissect it on our MMIC design page.

qorvo
qorvo is the new name of the recent rfmd and TriQuint merger.  In this "merger of equals", you can tell which company came out on top in many ways, such as the use of all lower case letters in the name...

The origins of the unique name have been explained in a press release. But what is the real story?  Is it because "corvo" is Portuguese for crow? Or did Jose Cuervo have something to do with it?

 

Qwave
Qwave is a new company with a short portfolio of surface mount GaAs pHEMT MMICs, including switches and a GPS-frequency LNA. They have facilities in Japan and Taiwan.

Raytheon
Raytheon maintains a captive fab for GaN and GaN in Andover, Massachusetts. Their GaN technology was credited for a win (October 2013) over Lockheed for the Air Missile Defense Radar which will replace SPY-1. Congrats!

Remec

RF Integration Inc.
Located in Lowell Massachusetts and Cork Ireland, RF Integration is a fabless RF/mixed signal manufacturer, in the business of developing custom chip-set solutions for customers. Every day is Saint Paddy's Day at RFI! Don't look for a product lineup on their web site, they don't show one. As a matter of fact, they don't give names of any people on their web site, maybe they are all on the witness protection plan. RFI claims to work in SiGe CMOS, GaAs, and SOI.

RFIC solutions
RFIC solutions is a startup with wide experience in GaAs, SiGe, GaN, Si, and InGaP. There web site alludes to intellectual property in a variety of MMIC designs, but apparently they are not in the business of suppling COTS parts. Contact us if you want to clarify!

rfmd

Update September 2014: qorvo is the new name of the recent rfmd and TriQuint merger. 

Update March 2014: TriQuint andrfmd announced that they will merge into a $2B business. This is roughly a merger of equals but the press releases state that rfmd is buying TriQuint for $1.6B. It is funny how the press releases have forgotten that "RFMD" was recently re-branded as "rfmd" (see below). The name of the new company has not been announced, it is temporarily called "NewCo" in the press releases (should it be "newco"?) NewCo will see $150M in cost savings over the next two years, which you might speculate means "RIF all handset power amplifier designers that wear cowboy boots and consolidate some of the design centers" followed by "close the Oregon fab". In any case, NewCo will have an impressive portfolio of commercial and military products and we wish them well.

Update October 2013: big news... RFMD is now branded as rfmd. Modesty is in this year, the Pope is often seen washing random people's feet. rfmd talked about six-inch GaN with gate lengths that can support millimeterwave at this year's CSICS conference.

Update March 2008: RFMD has announced that they will hold off building a new fab in North Carolina, because of their Filtronic purchase. Hooray for RFMD, for not paving paradise to put up a parking lot!

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.

Speaking of this merger, now RFMD owns the Filtronic amplifier line that dates back to the previous century starting at now-defunct Litton Solid State. They still haven't done the right thing and weeded out the FMA219 from the lineup. Through its acquisition of Filtronic, RFMD has an amplifier in our rogues gallery of conditionally stable amplifiers.

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 their 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 chronicling 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
Teledyne bought Rockwell Scientific in 2007, hence the name change.

Sapphicon

SiGe
Update May 19, 2011. SiGe was officially bought out by Skyworks for up to $275M, ending the dream that one day this Canadian company would join the Nasdaq exchange. So far no one has shown up in SiGe's Andover office with tags for the furniture, but don't be surprised if a Skyworks truck backs up and the tailpipe is routed into a window to clear out this "extra" design center...

SiGe was started by a bunch of Canadians who mistakenly pronounce their company "sigh-gee". They work in (guess what?) "siggy" MMICs, for applications such as Bluetooth, GPS and wireless LAN. Like most SiGe companies they use IBM's foundry, and grabbed a good many employees from Big Blue as well.

Silanna Semiconductor
Update September 2012: Back in 2010, Sapphicon changed their name to Silanna.

Silanna has a silicon-on-sapphire process similar to Peregrine. They offer a unique "compressed mask" prototype foundry option where only four masks are used to provide 16 layers (saves $$$). They are also the only US trusted foundry that is outside the United States, which says something about the relationship between US and Australia. And if you go to their web site and fill in a form, you can obtain pricing and technical information without the need for a nondisclosure agreement that most other fabs demand.

We added (August 2010) Sapphicon at the suggestion of David from Down Under who can't resist the temptation to plug these "local guys". We shamelessly stole this info from their web site...

For over 20 years the team at Sapphicon Semiconductor has been assisting customers to increase the performance and functionality of their products by developing high performance silicon chips.

Formerly a part of Peregrine Semiconductor it now services a global client base as an independent organization with headquarters and manufacturing in Sydney, Australia.

The company uses advanced Silicon-on-Sapphire process technology that makes possible the creation of high performance mixed signal analog devices such as RF switches, low noise amplifiers, high frequency VCOs and a myriad of other applications.

Sirenza
Sirenza was acquired by RF Micro Devices in 2007 and some individuals made some serious folding money. The nameplate "Sirenza" was soon retired.

Sirenza was once 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. 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 included 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.

Sivers IMA
This information was gratefully received from Alex, an employee of Sivers:

Sivers is located in Kista, Sweden, outside Stockholm. We've been around for more than 50 years. Currently produce mm-wave converters, FMCW modules, and VCOs. Most products use commercially available MMICs, but our mm-wave converters use our own in-house designed highly integrated SiGe MMICs, at V and E band. We also offer system integration services, after having acquired Trebax, a consulting company with a microwave/telecom focus, in Gothenburg.

Skyworks
Skyworks was born of the merger between Conexant and Alpha Industries. Conexant was once part of Rockwell International, and was not a "MMIC company" in the sense that it did not process GaAs chips, but offered signal processing for broadband communication systems. Alpha Industries was more of a traditional foundry, offering RF chip types for wireless commercial applications. Skyworks is SKWS on the New York Stock Exchange.

Skyworks apparently has a six inch fab in Woburn Massachusetts and a second six-inch line in Newbury Park California, and partners with a fab in Taiwan. (Thanks to Dan for pointing this out).

Alpha trivia: about 25 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!

STMicroelectronics
This is Europe's largest semi-conductor manufacturer, let's see how they got there and where they might be going. ST started out as a merger of two government-owned semiconductor companies in 1987: SGS Microelettronica (Italy, the "S" in ST), and Thomson Semiconducteurs (France, the "T" in ST). Over the years they have acquired manufacturing from Nortel, Alcatel and others. They offer a full lineup of silicon and BiCMOS processes and currently employ 48,000 people. A recent acquisition was Norstel, a Swedish SiC wafer manufacturer, in 2019. They have announced a partnership with Soitec to produce 200mm "SmartCut" SiC wafers in the future (at this point only 150mm SiC is available to our knowledge). They seem to have fabricated the chips inside Dishy, you can learn about that here. You can learn a lot more about STMicroelectronics on Wikipedia.

STMicroelectronics has an agreement with MACOM since 2018, to pursue GaN on silicon for power amplifiers.

Summit Semiconductor
A fabless company located in Fullerton CA, Summit has four employees with experience in GaAs and well as SiGe. So far they don't have any products they can show you on their web site, but they want you to know that they have done designs up to 60 GHz in their past lives. Their core experience came from Hughes and/or TRW back in the day. We wish them the best of luck!

SuperApex LLC
SuperApex has a website that shows a wide variety of GaAs products such as LNAs, power amps, phase shifters, and some passive MMICs like power dividers.  They also offer connectorized components.  The address that is given is an office suite outside Chicago, and there are no people listed under the "leadership" page. Are they an American company, or are they hiding their identity?  If anyone has information on SuperApex, please share it.

Teledyne Scientific and Imaging LLC
Teledyne bought Rockwell Scientific in 2007, hence the name change.

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 Teledyne's 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 Thoughtbeam
A perfect example of Our Gang marketing strategy, Thoughtbeam was founded by Motorola in 2001 to develop and market GaAs on silicon wafers, an idea that dates back to the 1980s but has never made anyone a dime. Too bad the price of GaAs came down when production ramped up, which made GaAs on silicon a tough sell. It turns out GaAs on silicon is a relatively expensive material to manufacture, due to the many extra hours it must spend in material growth. The only thing that Thoughtbeam ever demonstrated was some crummy MESFET technology in silicon, while the rest of the world had moved on to much more versatile pHEMTs, which need a much more complicated material stack that would be a lot harder to push onto silicon. Did Motorola do the right thing and retire the head of Thoughtbeam when they shuttered the operation? Nope, in a Dilbert moment they promoted Thoughtbeam's leader Padmasree Warrior to Chief Technology Officer of the entire Motorola company, and basically hosed the rest of the team, except for the French dude that reminded everyone that worked for him of Napoleon. Did we mention yet that Motorola invented "six sigma"? Thanks a pantload!

TelGaAs
TelGaAs is a design house, you bring them a spec and they design your chip.

Teramics
Teramics is a MMIC design house, here's a quote from their web site:

Teramics focus is in custom MMIC and RFIC design in GaAs, GaN, InP and SiGe processes, high frequency modules, components and sub-systems, from definition to volume production.

TLC Precision Wafer Technology
A spin-off of Honeywell, TLC is a small-business innovation research (SBIR) vendor located in Minneapolis, and has developed designs up through W-band. A MMIC vendor with soul!

Toshiba
 

Transcom
Transcom is another GaAs foundry in Taiwan. According to their web site they are capable of producing 15,000 wafers per year. Standard products cover up through Ku-band. They also sell packaged amplifier assemblies that use discrete FETs.

Tricon MMIC LLC
Updated for January 2023  We previously reported on Tricon's legal foibles dating back to 2019, taking the side of the prosecution long before the case played out in court. We sincerely apologize for that unfortunate bias, which we attribute to the fact that China is notorious for stealing US technology for decade, and the founder of Tricon was accused of selling secrets to China.  At one point Chinese-connected company faked a suicide of a U.S. engineer who was involved in exporting GaN technology and got cold feet. Tricon Founder Haoyang "Jack" Yu, a naturalized US citizen born in China, was arrested by the FBI in June 2019 and was charged with stealing intellectual property from Analog Devices. He was also charged with illegal exports, and had the full force of the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, Commerce Department and the U.S. Navy making a federal case about what amounted to, at most, copying some prototype MMIC designs from a large business (Analog Devices) to start a small business, a common but perhaps shady practice. Analog only recently started a civil suit against Tricon, well after the federal charges were levied against Yu, even though they sued MACOM Technologies when three former Analog employees were caught red-handed moving 500 GB of stolen data to their future employer (M/A-COM) back in 2018. The lawsuit was dropped; that goes to show you how rare it is for such a case to pay off.

Read an in-depth article about the Tricon case here:

https://theintercept.com/2022/12/22/semiconductor-trade-secret-haoyang-yu/

The article actually quotes from this Microwaves101 MMIC page...  "Go Figure" , raises the question of why military buyers ignore the fact that many of their MMIC chip designs are processed outside of the country, meaning that their data has already been exported and you can't put that genie back into the bottle.  "Go Figure" might have to end up on a Microwaves101 coffee mug someday. The article also quotes trade journal Law360, (read it if you are a subscriber): “The government’s relentless pursuit of Mr. Yu was driven, at least in part, by its baseless and offensive assumption that he was a Chinese spy, secretly loyal to China and, thus, a danger to the national security of the United States".

Leading up to his arrest, in one instance, Homeland Security investigators, posing as a “XY Atallah” from Jordan, told Yu by email they could "make business" if Yu would ignore export restrictions (which possibly didn't even apply).  Yu declined the offer. This ham-handed effort did not bode well for the prosecution, as the jury found Yu not guilty on 18 of 19 charges, with only a single charge of intellectual property theft registering a guilty verdict. Mr. Wu's fate is now in the hands of the judge; if he ends up with a prison sentence for a common white-collar crime that should have been settled in civil court, that would be a miscarriage of justice in our opinion.  After the dust settles, Mr. Yu might want to place a call to the ACLU to recover some damages.

The Tricon case involved some familiar Boston-area MMIC names and companies.  Perhaps one moral of the story is that just because a small business is owned by a married couple and is registered with the wife as the owner, and the business address is a post office box at a UPS store, that does not mean they are a nest of spies. Otherwise Microwaves101 would be at risk for investigations of additional crimes besides this cheesy website!

We wish Mr. Yu the best going forward.

TriQuint

Update September 2014: qorvo is the new name of the recent rfmd and TriQuint merger. 

Update March 2014: rfmd and TriQuint announced that they will merge into a $2B business. This is roughly a merger of equals but the press releases state that rfmd is buying TriQuint for $1.6B. It is funny how the press releases have forgotten that "RFMD" was recently re-branded as "rfmd". The name of the new company has not been announced, it is temporarily called "NewCo" in the press releases (should it be "newco"?) NewCo will see $150M in cost savings over the next two years, which you might speculate means "RIF all handset power amplifier designers that wear cowboy boots and consolidate some of the design centers" followed by "close the Oregon fab". In any case, NewCo will have an impressive portfolio of commercial and military products and we wish them well.

Update October 2013: "TriQuint Semiconductor" is now officially just "TriQuint" as they try to emphasize their module offerings. Too bad AMDR was won by Raytheon, otherwise TriQuint could have been in the L-band module business with Lockheed. At CSICS 2013 TriQuint announced they are working on commercializing GaN down to 0.09um gate length.
Update September 2011: TriQuint is closing their fab to commercial fabless companies that compete with them. Maybe they are sick of seeing Hittite's market cap at $1.6B with TriQuint $1.0B while they do all the heavy lifting. See page 11 of Hittite's recent SEC filing:

http://www.hittite.com/content/documents/HITT_2011_Q2_10Q.pdf

We haven't confirmed this but it is rumored that TriQuint is closing the fab to Mimix as well.

Update June 2008: TriQuint now offers GaN MMICs, and GaN foundry services, which they announced at the IMS Symposium this month in Atlanta.

Also in 2008: TriQuint acquired what was left of Watkins Johnson's MMIC line. Part numbers starting with AG and EC (DC-6 GHz HBT amplifiers) are the legacy WJ products.

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.

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
about TriQuint MMIC's mounting temperature?

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!

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)
We're adding this silicon fab to our MMIC suppliers list, as TSMC offers RF CMOS. Thanks to Mohan!

From TSMC's web site:

Established in 1987, TSMC is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry. As the founder and leader of this industry, TSMC has built its reputation on offering advanced wafer production processes and unparalleled manufacturing efficiency. From its inception, TSMC has consistently offered the foundry industry's leading technologies to its customers. The company's manufacturing capacity exceeds 8 million 8-inch equivalent wafers in 2007, while its revenues represent some 50% of the dedicated foundry segment in the semiconductor industry.

TSMC operates two advanced 300mm wafer fabs, four 8-inch wafer fabs, and one 6-inch wafer fab. Fab operations are centralized in Taiwan, primarily in the Hsinchu Science Park and the Tainan Science Park. TSMC fabs are also located in Camas, Washington (WaferTech), Singapore (SSMC, a joint venture with NXP Semiconductors), and Shanghai, China.

United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC)
We're adding this silicon fab to our MMIC suppliers list, as UMC offers RF CMOS. Thanks to Mohan! From UMC's web site:

UMC is a leading global semiconductor foundry that provides advanced technology and manufacturing services for applications spanning every major sector of the IC industry. Founded in 1980 as Taiwan's first semiconductor company, UMC is the world's foundry technology leader, consistently first-to-market on advanced processes and possessing the highest number of semiconductor patents in the industry. UMC's customer-driven foundry solutions enable chip designers to leverage the strength of the company's leading-edge processes, which include production-proven 65nm, 45/40nm, mixed signal/RFCMOS, and a wide range of specialty technologies. The company employs approximately 12,000 people worldwide and has an extensive network of service offices in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Europe, and the United States to meet the needs of its global clientele.

United Monolithic Semiconductor (UMS)
The country that developed the venerable Maginot Line now offers some pretty good millimeter-wave MMICs. Actually, UMS is a joint venture between French and Germans. You can't make this stuff up. What's next, are they going to move into the old Krup's cannon factory?

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:

One is surprised that the only thing you have to say about France is a comment on the ML, far-fetched if anything, until one reminds oneself that you are an American, therefore a moron who was brought up by peasants who told him, bending over the cradle, that the French had a king, Louis the XIVth, but no electricity.

As to the rest of your intellectually indigent comment, the French and the Germans (and other European partners on occasions) have come up with many a joint venture since the end of WW2, including Europe, a space programme that left the arrogant NASA in the dust, a commercial aircraft programme which has not made the Old World more popular in Seattle, a number of successful military hardware programmes, and, last but not least, a movement which acted against the 2nd war in Irak in a debate where decency disputed arrogance until the latter shamed Uncle Sam by means of blatant military incompetence and body bags.

I looked at your juvenile web page "Unknown Editor". I would be touching if you were not at the age where others have grown up: you're pathetic.

Stewart, a U.K microwave engineer

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
US Monolithics is now Viasat Advanced Microwave Products. Thanks to John!

This marketing jive came right off their web site, in October 2008!

We offer monolithic semiconductor design, millimeter wave MMICs, high power transceiver design, high levels of functional integration, high-frequency packaging, and design for low-cost manufacturing. Our capabilities cover the full range of frequencies from L- to W-band and we're agile enough to meet commercial, military, and space requirements. An array of packaging options fit different environmental and performance needs. Flexibility in our production allows us to make one-time unique products as well as cost-effective high volume products, and everything in between.

USI
A company with almost the same name as the one below!

USTI
Universal Semiconductor Technology, Inc. is where Mimix Broadband disposed of the Celeritek foundry. Thanks to Arnold for setting us straight!

VectraWave
We've recently added (August 2010) Vectrawave at the suggestion of David from Down Under... and we shamelessly stole this info from their web site...

VectraWave was founded in 2006 to provide OEM's with a partner with well-rounded expertise in the most advanced Microwave, RF and Optical/RF technologies and design techniques. This unique combination of engineering and manufacturing depth is the cornerstone of component designs that enable improved system performance, lower manufacturing cost, and accelerated time to market.

VectraWave is focused on DC to millimeterwave single function to highly integrated semiconductors and ASICs, system-in-package (SIP) modules, and multi-chip modules (MCM) for microwave, RF and lightwave applications. SiP technology is being embraced as an ideal solution for applications that demand miniaturization with sophisticated functionality. SiP also provides the added benefit of compatibility with die design changes and integration of various die technologies (e.g., Si, GaAs, SiGe, SOI, MEMS).

Velocium
Update October 2007: the name Velocium may soon be retire, Northrop has announced that Hittite will perform the marketing operation of these MMICs...

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.

ViaSat Advanced Microwave Products
ViaSat got into the MMIC field when they bought US Monolithics.

Viper RF
Viper another fabless MMIC company, with ties to the Newton Aycliffe (UK) fab that was bought by RFMD. founded by Drs. Mayock and Chan. The two had previously worked together at Filtronic Compound Semiconductors. Viper offers a surprising list of millimeter-wave MMICs to 94 GHz, including coverage of the commercial E-band. Established in 2008, they provide custom designs for clients as well as products. Thanks to Lehane for the suggestion!

Our only question about Viper is: why not spell it "Vipre"? Show some pride in British misspelling, like litre, calibre, theatre, metre...

"Rumour" has it that Viper is quite familiar with Win Semi and TriQuint processes.

Vitesse
June 28, 2006 was the last day that Vitesse traded on NASDAQ. VTSS was delisted but now trades over-the-counter.

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 ax InP soon, maybe sell to BAE (TFAST partner). Pure speculation..."

Vubiq

Wilocity

WIN Semiconductors
If you are looking for a huge offshore foundry to produce your GaAs chips at the lowest possible price, you should consider Win Semi. WIN stands for "wireless information networking". Strategic alliances with companies like AWR and PRFI 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 now part of TriQuint.

Update May 2008: TriQuint announced it has completed its acquisition of WJ. A startup named Amp Tech bought the WJ foundry located in Milipitas California, TQNT didn't want it to play with this collection of aging semiconductor equipment.

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!

Wolfspeed
Wolfspeed spun out of Cree years ago, and offers a line of high-powered GaN amplifiers that cover just about every Satcom, radar and EW need. In August 2023, Wolfspeed announced their RF business will be sold to MACOM for $125M, which presumably would include an RF chip fab in Durham North Carolina. This allows Wolfspeed to focus on GaN used in power electronics, a much larger marketplace. This is not the first Durham fab MACOM rodeo ride, see Nitronex for a worst-case analysis of what could happen.  Good luck to everyone involved!

Xiamen Sanan Integrated Circuit
Here is a "pure-play"* semi-conductor fab in China, with $500B invested. It is just a matter of time before China will be the biggest player in this field. Note that when you go to thier web site, it is not secure.  What a surprise... They already have a six-inch SiC process, and GaAs, InP, VCSEL and SAW stuff.  You can imagine this is a dual-use set-up, making cheap parts for 5G phones while pursuing military advantages.

* Pure play usually means that a fab does not try to capture your designs.

Xpert Semiconductor Inc.
Xpert is a supplier of epitaxially-grown GaAs wafers, in both four and six inch diameters. They are located in Taiwan, no doubt a convenient distance to Win Semi. They plan to double the capacity of their 4000 square foot facility to manufacture 3000 six-inch wafers per month by the end of 2004. That's enough GaAs to easily tile the roof of a good-sized house each year!

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!)