everything RF recently interviewed Christopher Marki who is the CEO (Chief Operating Officer) at Marki Microwave. For over 30 years, Marki Microwave has been solving the industry’s toughest technical problems by creating a robust portfolio of performance-shattering RF and microwave components. We last interviewed Chris in 2017. Click here to read the previous interview.
Q. Can you tell us about your product portfolio? Which product segment is the largest for you?
Christopher Marki: Since 2019 we have accelerated the development of components that allow us to support the entire small signal block diagram, from the RF Input/Output through to the data converter interface. We are best known for our mixer portfolio, but our hybrid passive components are now a similar percentage of the business, and we are seeing rapid growth in investment areas such as amplifiers and filters. This product diversification allows Marki to continue to grow and remain relevant to our customer base.
Q. The passive component market is a competitive space with a lot of players who have been around for a long time. How are you differentiating your passive components portfolio from other companies?
Christopher Marki: The RF space in general is very competitive; we focus on a few key areas.
- Performance – Our objective is to obtain the best performance possible, period.
- Packaging – Size reduction and high frequency are the two main technical drivers right now. We are packaging-agnostic and employ both hybrid and microelectronic packaging approaches to obtain industry-leading performance with the smallest possible form factor. We have patented a way to produce exceptionally small chip scale packages that allow us to offer great performance by making the packaging penalty negligibly small.
- Ease of doing business
- Customer Centric: We listen to our customers! Marki lives in markets that are low volume and high mix. Many companies don’t like these markets, as you can’t do a single design and then stamp out millions of the same widget. We work closely with customers to understand what they need and try to aggregate various product requirements together so we can design a product that will support multiple use cases while remaining cost effective.
- Technical Support: Many of our customers are starved of RF talent, so we try and make it easy for them to use our products by providing world-class technical support. Marki’s datasheets are comprehensive, we take test data for customers based on their individual use case, we have many free tools, technical primers, and white papers that are all easy to access on our website (www.markimicrowave.com).
Q. Marki Microwave has built a reputation for its excellence in RF mixers. Can you provide additional insights into the diverse selection of mixers you produce, including their applications, various types, etc? How do they differ from the mixers offered by other manufacturers?
Christopher Marki: We are the only company in the world that features best-in-class hybrid and MMIC mixers. When I started, 90% of our business was in hybrid mixers and we were already seeing the breakdown of our traditional hybrid competitors. We doubled down on this trend by working with customers to provide them with a stable supply of those traditional mixers. We spent significant resources to make sure that our diode supply—the critical component for a hybrid mixer—was safe and stable “forever”. There was considerable supply disruption in diode components due to M&A activity in the mid-2010s and, thankfully, we dodged that problem because I had already developed second sources for everything we were buying from the incumbents. Recently, one of the last remaining hybrid mixer competitors exited the market; I assume this was largely caused by lack of diode supply and the inability to keep the art alive. That supply and art is alive and well at Marki.
At the same time, my dad and I took all our mixer knowledge and put it into MMIC mixers. My dad invented many novel mixer circuits that had never been attempted at the IC level. With his mentorship, I ported all those designs to a MMIC platform to gain the advantages of IC technology without sacrificing performance. Today, we are the only company in the world that has mastered the art of “complicated” MMIC mixers, such as triple balanced and high linearity diode mixers—as exemplified by our MT3 line. Our mixer catalog is both wide and deep, and we have even released concepts that will continue to offer our customers future improvements in performance.
Q. Can you tell us about the new MMIC filters that you have introduced?
Christopher Marki: MMIC filters offer a clean canvas for innovation that has been mostly ignored by the market. We have been developing standard low-pass, high-pass, bandpass filters, and diplexers, and have the benefit of being able to utilize lumped element, distributed, and quasi-lumped element designs. The heart of this work, however, is that we have mastered the design flow to the point where we can precisely design any filter with incredible precision. We achieve first-pass success nearly every time and this can all be done very quickly due to several years and many generations of iterative improvement. What we have found is that we are just scratching the surface of what is achievable. These technical benefits are in addition to the well accepted benefits of MMICs, including small size and cost effectiveness, especially at volume.
Q. Can you tell us about the New MMIC Filter Tool that you have developed?
Christopher Marki: Prodigy ™ Filter Designer enables our customers to instantly get a fully 3D simulated filter design that is an accurate representation of what they would receive with a real-life filter. Basically, the tool puts the power of our design methodology in the palm of our customers’ hands. The critical feature is, we base Prodigy results on highly accurate 3D modeled results that represent a nearly perfect prediction of a real-life filter. Different variants of these designs can be quickly dialed up by employing a novel machine learning design flow. Due to Prodigy’s speed—which updates in real time—the customer can optimize and tweak a filter design on demand while they design a system. We believe this is game-changing, as it minimizes system-level risk and provides customers with a cost-effective solution for filter development.
Screenshot of the Prodigy Filter Designer - Click here to try it out!
Q. Do you offer standard products or do develop custom solutions for customers?
Christopher Marki: Whether it is filters or other components, we work closely with customers to develop standard products and custom products. In most cases it benefits both the customer and Marki if the products are standard, allowing us to amortize costs across multiple customers. This is always our preference, but we understand that doesn’t always work and do many custom designs.
Q. Marki Microwave recently acquired Precision Millimeter Wave? What drove this acquisition? What are some synergies that you expect as a result of this acquisition?
Christopher Marki: When we look at the RF and mmWave markets we see a continued push to high frequencies. For surface mount products, we have invested in developing a chip scale packaging platform that allows us to support plastic surface mount packages up to 70GHz utilizing standard reflow techniques. We have broadband connectorized products up to 120GHz and die that push beyond 140GHz. The obvious next step for us was to support waveguide interfaces, enabling us to push into sub-THz ranges, leverage our existing die and design capability, and also utilize the existing production capabilities that we have at our headquarters in Morgan Hill, CA. Click here to read more about the acquisition.
Q. What market segments do you cater to? Which segment is the largest for you?
Christopher Marki: Our two primary market segments are Aerospace and Defense and Test and Measurement, and growing areas include Space and “New” Space. We also do a lot of research and lab-type components that are typically connectorized, including Quantum Computing and other more niche markets.
Q. Who are your customers and where are they located?
Christopher Marki: We have traditionally been very North American-centric, which is still the largest percentage of our business. A key focus for us over the last few years has been to grow our EMEA business; we now have local support based out of the UK and have been steadily growing this region. Our sales channel plays a critical role in our success as they multiply the number of feet on the street. The channel is optimized based on each region with a combination of reps, resellers, and a global distributor. The eCommerce store is another piece of the channel puzzle - it is important as it supports customers who know what they want and need something quickly, so a lot of the sales through the store are connectorized products.
Q. What were the highlights of 2023? What does 2024 look like for Marki Microwave?
Christopher Marki: There are a few things that stand out in 2023.
- We had a lot of success in growing the number of unique parts per design, which validated our focus on building out the block diagram and will set us up well for 2024.
- The market interest and subsequent adoption of MMIC filters has been phenomenal. Internally, we had convinced ourselves that the technology was going to be game-changing, but you never know until you take something to market. We have been shocked by the response and the release of the Prodigy Filter Designer will just provide fuel to this rocket ship.
In 2024,
- We have already released the Prodigy filter design tool, and we will continue to develop our filter capabilities and product depth.
- You will start to see an acceleration in the roll-out of high-frequency surface mount and new waveguide products.
About Marki Microwave
For over 30 years, Marki Microwave has been solving the industry’s toughest technical problems by creating a robust portfolio of performance-shattering RF and microwave components. Founded in 1991 with the goal of developing the best mixers in the industry, today Marki Microwave is a single source for high performance, broadband microwave products. They support multiple form factors including die, surface mount, and connectorized solutions for the entire RF block diagram from DC to sub-THz frequencies.
