Cavendish Kinetics of San Jose CA, USA, which provides RF MEMS tuning solutions for smartphones, handheld and wearable wireless devices, says that its SmarTune antenna tuning solution is gaining significant traction in the LTE smartphone market, after the first OEM adopted SmarTune at the end of 2014.
Now shipping in five different smartphone models, the new design wins address difficult LTE spectrum band combinations, especially the 2GHz band required in the Chinese market and the 700/800MHz bands required by many European and North American operators. For the first time, SmarTune is now also being used to optimize the performance of the LTE MIMO antenna.
Now that most OEMs recognize the benefit of aperture tuning over impedance matching, they are finding that SmarTune allows them to design very small, highly efficient antennas that are needed to enable ever slimmer smartphones, without sacrificing radio performance, says Cavendish. The firm's RF MEMS tuners are claimed to outperform traditional antenna tuning solutions based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) switches by 2-3dB, resulting in much higher data rates (up to 2x) and improved battery life (up to 40%). For network operators the SmarTune-enabled devices provide more efficient spectrum utilization as increased data rates allow more users to be served in the same amount of spectrum, says Cavendish. Optimizing the MIMO performance in smartphones further improves user data rates and network efficiency.
"The fast-growing number of design wins for our SmarTune antenna tuning solutions underscores the superior performance and unparalleled reliability of our RF MEMS tuners compared to all other tuning solutions," claims Lars Johnsson, VP product marketing. "The 2-3dB of additional performance that our RF MEMS tuners enable makes a critical difference to ensure that the new generation of ultra-slim smartphones can have outstanding radio performance across the global LTE spectrum footprint."
