Akoustis Technologies, a manufacturer of patented single-crystal BulkONE bulk acoustic wave (BAW) high-band RF filters, has received its first purchase order from a Tier-1 smartphone OEM. The new customer, according to Akoustis, is one of the five largest smartphone manufacturers in the world and requires two band-specific, high-frequency BAW RF filters targeting both high band LTE and 5 GHz WiFi. Akoustis expects to deliver these filters to the customer before December 31, 2017.
The new smartphone OEM customer selected Akoustis based on its demonstrated capability to deliver miniature RF filter solutions at frequencies up to 6 GHz. Akoustis’ patented single crystal BAW technology enables superior high frequency filter skirt performance for band coexistence requirements compared to traditional integrated passive device (IPD) and ceramic-type filters for emerging 5G mobile and existing 5GHz WiFi standards.
Since August 2017, the company has separately announced initial prototype shipments of RF filters for the 4G/LTE mobile market (2.6 GHz), a radar application (above 3.5 GHz), the industry’s first single crystal 5.2GHz BAW RF filters for 802.11ac Tri-Band WiFi routers, and diplexer single crystal BAW filter module prototypes in the frequency spectrum below 1.5GHz - all produced out of the company’s recently acquired wafer manufacturing facility.
They are pioneering next-generation material science to address the market requirements for improved RF filters - targeting higher bandwidth, higher operating frequencies and higher output power compared to incumbent polycrystalline BAW technology deployed today. Superior performance is driven by the significant advances of high-purity, single-crystal piezoelectric materials and the resonator-filter process technology. The advanced material properties drive electro-mechanical coupling, which translates to wide filter bandwidth. High-band RF filters are achieved by leveraging the company’s high-sound velocity, single-crystal piezoelectric materials. These single-crystal piezoelectric materials offer high-thermal conductivity along the path of heat flow, enabling high-power handling capability of the RF filter.
