Akoustis Technologies has announced the shipment of its patented 5.2 GHz Wi-Fi XBAW filters to multiple customers. The company had announced its first system-on-chip (SoC) customer back in November 2018. The customer was a multi-billion-dollar Tier-1 WiFi SoC vendor, who was developing 4x4 and 8x8 multi-user, multiple-in, multiple-out (MU-MIMO) architectures for the 802.11ax WiFi radio standard and chose Akoustis’ patented XBAW filters for inclusion in future reference designs. Today’s announcement includes the complete initial product shipment to this first SoC customer.
The company announced a second SoC customer in early January 2019, and successfully booked and shipped 5.2 GHz pre-production XBAW filters to this customer in the March quarter. This customer intends to use the filters for evaluation and approval for 4x4 and 8x8 MU-MIMO reference designs. In the December quarter, Akoustis announced it had received its first purchase order for its 5.2 GHz filters from a global distributor. Today’s announcement also includes the first commercial shipments to this global distributor in the March quarter to support resale activity, as well as a second 5.2 GHz filter order shipped to this customer within the past ten days.
Akoustis’ XBAW filter shipments are in addition to the shipments to the new global RF customer announced last week, which purchased over 80,000 units of the 5.2 GHz WiFi filter. As part of that announcement, Akoustis and the global RF company have executed a non-exclusive product development and supply agreement for RF coexistence filters along with a statement of work for new WiFi customer premise equipment (CPE) filter solutions to support the customer’s expanding product portfolio. Akoustis expects to make additional commercial volume shipments later this calendar year to both this customer as well as the global distributor.
The Akoustis 5.2 GHz XBAW filter was chosen by all four customers due to its high performance and significantly smaller size relative to incumbent dielectric resonators. Akoustis’ WiFi filters are developed and manufactured in its Canandaigua, NY fabrication facility using its patented XBAW process. Pre-production units are expected to be used for evaluation and approval for future access point and other WiFi infrastructure designs. The company previously achieved first XBAW filter product revenue in the September 2018 quarter. Today’s announcement demonstrates further market traction and ongoing ramp of the company’s supply chain for XBAW filters over the last six months.
Akoustis has introduced several new filters over the past twelve months including its 5.2 GHz and 5.6 GHz WiFi co-existence filters, a 3.8 GHz filter for military phased-array radar applications, a 3.6 GHz filter for the CBRS infrastructure market and Band 25 downlink and uplink filters for LTE infrastructure. The company is also developing several new filters for the sub 7 GHz bands targeting 5G mobile device, network infrastructure, WiFi CPE and military markets.
