everything RF Interviewed Sam Benzacar, CEO of Anatech Electronics, a privately-held, ISO 9001:2008-certified company founded in 1990 that focuses on the design and manufacturing of RF and microwave filters and related products. Their broad array of products are employed in commercial, aerospace and defense, and industrial applications throughout the world.
Q. Can you give us a brief history of Anatech Electronics?
Anatech Electronics was founded in 1990 to be a source of high-quality standard and custom RF and microwave filters while also serving as a partner to RF engineers seeking to solve difficult filtering solutions.
Q. Can you tell us about your product portfolio? What types of filters do you manufacture? Are there any filter types you specialize in?
Anatech Electronics specializes in RF and microwave filters, such as bandpass, low pass, high pass, band stop, and notch, as well duplexers, triplexers, multiplexers, and switched filter banks using lumped-element, cavity, ceramic, waveguide, SAW, and suspended substrate technologies. We specialize in custom LC and cavity-type filters that have very complex performance requirements.
Q. What differentiates you from other filter companies?
We have extensive experience in the design, fabrication, and customization of filters, which allows us to solve filtering problems that competing manufacturers either cannot or do not want to take the time to solve. Our technical and sales team is also very responsive to customer needs, and our turnaround time, even for custom designs, is typically much shorter than the industry norm.
Q. Do you develop standard products or custom products? What is a breakdown for the two in terms of revenue? What is the typical turnaround time for the development of a custom filter?
Anatech develops standard and custom products, in a ratio of about 50% to 50%, respectively. Typical turnaround on standard filters is no more than 48 hours for items in stock and 4-6 weeks for standard products not in stock. Turnaround time for a custom filter depends on the complexity of the requirements and ranges from 4 to 10 weeks.
Q. What market segments do you target? What industry segments drive the most business for you? What is the breakdown of these segments? Do you see this changing over the next few years?
Anatech Electronics targets both military and commercial markets, and while we are now delivering more products for commercial applications than in the past, the defense market still represents a very substantial portion of our business. We believe this scenario will continue in the foreseeable future.
Q. What is the geographic makeup of your customers? What is the % of sales in these regions? Is there any specific country or continent that you target more than others?
Anatech Electronics does business globally, with about 75% coming for the US market and 25 % globally. However, Anatech Electronics specifically targets the US market.
Q. How have RF and microwave filter requirements changed over the years? Are there any new technologies or filter types you have had to develop to support the new set of standards created every few years?
The requirements have been more demanding because of the need for miniaturization while maintaining the same performance. Advances in material technologies and manufacturing processes make the design of certain RF filters more achievable today than in the past, such as more precise and smaller CNC and routing machines, and advances in dielectric materials. Higher precision results in higher-tolerance suspended-substrate filters increased the Q factor, and lower passive intermodulation distortion.
Q. Are you developing filters for 5G? What are some challenges you have faced when developing 5G filters? How did you overcome those challenges?
Anatech Electronics has filters designed specifically for the often-unique requirements of 5G, especially at millimeter-wave frequencies between 25 and 38 GHz. Precise machining and more sophisticated software make the challenges easier to overcome.
Q. What are some key areas or interesting applications for which you are now developing filters?
There are more services operating at more frequencies than ever before, and the spectrum is very dense with signals, which provides us an opportunity to produce filters with very high rejection to mitigate interference problems.
Q. Anatech Electronics recently announced the launch of Anatech Microwave. Can you tell us more about this new company? What is the objective of launching this new company?
Anatech Microwave is a sister company to Anatech Electronics and concentrates on wideband products such as power dividers, directional couplers, LNAs, attenuators, circulators, terminators, and other broadband devices.
Q. What is the roadmap for Anatech Electronics for the next five years?
We intend to exploit the unique opportunities presented by the increasing number of commercial wireless applications as well as defense systems that require higher performance at higher frequencies. We will likely concentrate more than we have in past years on products for millimeter-wave frequencies as this is where all applications are headed in the future.
