Shipments of LTE smartphones supporting more cellular bands will drive antenna tuner shipments to billions of units per year, according to the new Strategy Analytics report, "Antenna Tuners & Tunable Components for Cellular Terminals: Update & Forecast 2014 – 2019."
Click here for the report: http://bit.ly/1ziBH0h
- More than one billion phones will ship with antenna tuners in 2019, each using two or more antenna tuners on average
- Benefits will go to top RF front-end subsystem and antenna tuning component suppliers RFMD (Qorvo), Qualcomm, Skyworks and Peregrine Semi (Murata)
- Antenna specialists and smaller suppliers promoting new technologies such as RF MEMS tuners will also win some share
- OEMs, wireless operators and consumers will benefit with better-performing smartphones.
Antenna tuners have emerged quite recently as an important means of improving call quality mainly in LTE phones, which have less space available for antennas tasked with supporting an ever-increasing number of cellular bands.
According to Christopher Taylor, Director of the RF & Wireless Components (RFWC) strategic advisory service and author of the report, "CMOS SoI (silicon on insulator) switches for configuring the antenna lead in the market, supplied primarily by RFMD. Qualcomm, Skyworks, and a host of other suppliers are not far behind. What sets the leading suppliers apart is expertise in RF switch technology, and breadth of RF front-end products and subsystem solutions."
Steven Entwistle, Vice President of Strategic Technologies at Strategy Analytics, added "RF MEMS look very promising as a technology for tunable antennas, adjustable PA impedance and potentially even tunable RF filters. We expect to see antenna tuning design wins for MEMS-based devices from Cavendish Kinetics and WiSpry in phones in 2015, and could see MEMS take a significant share of the market by 2019."
