Qorvo has announced the acquisition of Cavendish Kinetics Inc, a leading provider of RF MEMS technology for antenna tuning. Cavendish Kinetics is the leading provider of high-performance RF MEMS components smartphones, mobile infrastructure, IoT and defense. The low loss nature of RF MEMS allows customers to maximize RF performance, resulting in faster data rates, extended battery life, and innovative form factor designs. The company is led by industry veterans with extensive expertise across the RF semiconductor and MEMS ecosystem, including companies like Texas Instruments, Motorola, Broadcom, Sirf, Inphi, and Skycross. It is headquartered in Silicon Valley California, with additional offices in Texas, Netherlands, Korea, and China.
The Cavendish Kinetics (CK) team will continue to advance RF MEMS technology for applications across Qorvo’s product lines and transition the technology into high-volume manufacturing for mobile devices and other markets.
According to Eric Creviston, President of Qorvo Mobile Products, the addition of Cavendish Kinetics will allow them to build on the market leadership in antenna tuning. Several of the world’s leading smartphone suppliers have validated significant improvements in antenna performance through lower losses and higher linearity delivered by CK’s RF MEMS technology. Qorvo will build on the great work CK has done by optimizing and scaling the technology and applying it to other applications like infrastructure and defense.
RF MEMS devices are used to tune both main and diversity smartphone antennas across low, mid and high bands, resulting in stronger signals and faster data rates. RF MEMS maximize performance through outstanding Q-factor, improved linearity and extremely low insertion losses, offering great potential for improving 4G and 5G system performance.
Qorvo has been a lead strategic investor in San Jose-based Cavendish Kinetics since 2015. The company will provide additional details about this transaction during its fiscal 2020 second quarter earnings conference call.
