Qorvo has announced that its UK-based Mobile Product design team launched and safely returned a Qorvo payload 22 miles into space. The launch was part of a team-building exercise and a commemoration of Qorvo's fifth anniversary. Qorvo was formed on January 2, 2015 following the merger of RFMD and TriQuint Semiconductor, two companies with many decades of RF expertise in commercial and defense markets.
Qorvo's UK design team, led by Andy Coulthard, director of Mobile Product Design Engineering, undertook the launch of an acrylic Qorvo logo mounted with one of its best-selling antenna switch parts, the QM13114. Nearly 1.2 billion of these Qorvo UK team-designed antenna switches were shipped last year for integration in marquee smartphones by the world's leading OEMs.
The Qorvo payload was launched via hydrogen-filled balloon, ascending 22 miles into space and flying over 50 miles across England, from Chippenham to Watlington before a successful recovery by Andy and the UK design team. The Reading-based team tracked the 3.5-hour flight via a car-mounted radio receiver/antenna.
While a 22-mile space launch might seem impressive, it's a small feat for Qorvo products that have been traveling through deep space for several decades. The New Horizons spacecraft transmitted breathtaking views of Pluto when it was 8,000 miles from the dwarf planet in July 2015, thanks to Qorvo's frequency tripler, voltage-controlled oscillators, and power amplifiers. More recently, New Horizons beamed photos of Ultima Thule, a peanut-shaped asteroid in the Kuiper Belt 4.1 billion miles from Earth.
