I follow a BAW filter company for investment purposes, and they issued the following press release today. You folks know the industry far better than anyone and I hoped you could help me decipher the clues within. How many multi-billion dollar SoC vendors are out there supplying reference designs for 802.11ax(WiFi-6)? I thought Qualcomm and Broadcom pretty much ruled that market? Are there other players of importance? Marvell? Any others? Thanks!
Akoustis Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKTS) (“Akoustis” or the “Company”), a manufacturer of patented bulk acoustic wave (BAW) high-band RF filters for mobile and other wireless applications, announced that it has received its first pre-production order from a multi-billion dollar Tier-1 system-on-chip (SoC) vendor to supply 5.2 GHz XBAW filters for a reference design targeting tri-band WiFi customer premise equipment (CPE).
The reference design is expected to be compatible with both 4X4 and 8X8 multi-user multiple-in, multiple-out (MU-MIMO) architectures for the 802.11ax WiFi radio standard. Regarding filter content for tri-band architectures, a 4X4 MU-MIMO CPE requires four 5.2 GHz filters and an 8X8 requires eight 5.2 GHz filters. The AKF-1252 was chosen for this reference design due to its high performance and significantly smaller size relative to incumbent dielectric resonator filters. Akoustis expects to ship pre-production filters to this customer in the current quarter for evaluation and approval, which is expected by the end of Q1 CY19.
Jeff Shealy, Founder and CEO of Akoustis, commented, “We have achieved another key milestone as momentum for our 5.2 GHz WiFi filter product continues to build with this first reference design and pre-production order from a Tier-1 WiFi SoC leader.” Mr. Shealy continued, “Given the small size and high performance of our XBAW RF filters, we believe there is significant opportunity for Akoustis to gain market share in the WiFi CPE segment.”
The AKF-1252 is a high performance, ultra-small passband 5.2 GHz BAW RF filter designed for use in tri-band WiFi router applications. The filters are produced using Akoustis’ proprietary XB1 single-crystal BAW manufacturing process, which delivers high-performance RF filter solutions for frequencies up to 7 GHz to address critical RF filter requirements for existing and next generation communications applications, including the emerging 5G mobile network. The filter is 23 times smaller than existing solutions in the market, which is increasingly compelling given the introduction of MIMO and MU-MIMO architectures as well as the rapid adoption of small form-factor end user devices.
Akoustis Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKTS) (“Akoustis” or the “Company”), a manufacturer of patented bulk acoustic wave (BAW) high-band RF filters for mobile and other wireless applications, announced that it has received its first pre-production order from a multi-billion dollar Tier-1 system-on-chip (SoC) vendor to supply 5.2 GHz XBAW filters for a reference design targeting tri-band WiFi customer premise equipment (CPE).
The reference design is expected to be compatible with both 4X4 and 8X8 multi-user multiple-in, multiple-out (MU-MIMO) architectures for the 802.11ax WiFi radio standard. Regarding filter content for tri-band architectures, a 4X4 MU-MIMO CPE requires four 5.2 GHz filters and an 8X8 requires eight 5.2 GHz filters. The AKF-1252 was chosen for this reference design due to its high performance and significantly smaller size relative to incumbent dielectric resonator filters. Akoustis expects to ship pre-production filters to this customer in the current quarter for evaluation and approval, which is expected by the end of Q1 CY19.
Jeff Shealy, Founder and CEO of Akoustis, commented, “We have achieved another key milestone as momentum for our 5.2 GHz WiFi filter product continues to build with this first reference design and pre-production order from a Tier-1 WiFi SoC leader.” Mr. Shealy continued, “Given the small size and high performance of our XBAW RF filters, we believe there is significant opportunity for Akoustis to gain market share in the WiFi CPE segment.”
The AKF-1252 is a high performance, ultra-small passband 5.2 GHz BAW RF filter designed for use in tri-band WiFi router applications. The filters are produced using Akoustis’ proprietary XB1 single-crystal BAW manufacturing process, which delivers high-performance RF filter solutions for frequencies up to 7 GHz to address critical RF filter requirements for existing and next generation communications applications, including the emerging 5G mobile network. The filter is 23 times smaller than existing solutions in the market, which is increasingly compelling given the introduction of MIMO and MU-MIMO architectures as well as the rapid adoption of small form-factor end user devices.
