Filtronic, a leading designer and manufacturer of antennas, filters, and mm-Wave products for the wireless telecoms and critical communication markets, has shipped a total of 25,000 high-performance E-band transceiver modules since the Company first entered this growing market.
The wide bandwidths available in E-band spectrum (71 – 76 GHz and 81 – 86 GHz) offer OEMs the ability to provide mobile network operators with multi-Gbps backhaul and fronthaul. E-band is now experiencing significant growth following its recent identification as one of the critical wireless technologies required to address the demanding backhaul capacity requirements of 5G networks. Systems containing Filtronic’s core E-band technology have been successfully demonstrated at data rates up to 40 Gbps.
Filtronic’s latest generation E-band transceiver product, Orpheus, went into production in 2016, and since then 10,000 Orpheus modules have been shipped to several customers, including leading OEMs, for incorporation into their high-capacity mobile backhaul radio solutions. This recent success has added to the large number of earlier-generation E-band products the Company had shipped. Strong ongoing orders have also been secured out to the financial year-end.
Orpheus’ highly-integrated architecture enables it to simply drop into the radio between the antenna and baseband modem, and it has been widely deployed and field-proven in wide-bandwidth, high-capacity applications up to 10Gbps per channel. It has now been qualified for deployment in the latest radio platforms specifically developed for 5G X-haul applications and continues to be a recommended transceiver product for new designs.
Filtronic has also developed leading-edge custom E-band solutions for other telecom applications globally, including low SWaP, multi-channel, high RF power systems employing highly efficient power combining techniques. This technology is integrated into the Cerus E-band power amplifier module, which is targeted at applications including long-range defence, enterprise, and High Altitude Pseudo-Satellite (HAPS).
