Gennum Corp., a leader in volume manufacturing of Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) capacitor chips, announced that Paratek Microwave Inc., a leader in the design of radio frequency (RF) solutions, has selected Gennum's manufacturing process for its proprietary products geared towards the RF markets. The primary application for the products will be in the cell phone market where they will be used to increase the performance of handsets and reduce component size thus allowing incremental form factor reduction and/or feature adds.


Gennum has developed its own propriety manufacturing process using BST to manufacture decoupling capacitors for its hearing instrument products since 1999. Through the Paratek relationship, Gennum will earn revenue through the manufacture and delivery of capacitors for Paratek, in wafer or die form, as well as engineering fees. Product revenues are expected to commence in late 2006.

Paratek designs and manufactures adaptive RF front-end component solutions for mobile wireless applications requiring multi-mode and multi-band operation. The use of adaptive impedance technology simultaneously improves power amplifier efficiency and linearity, signal link margin, antenna size and battery life by optimizing RF power transfer throughout the system under all modulation protocols.

Paratek's product offerings cover four major applications including adaptive impedance matching modules (AIMM), broadband pre-selectors and RF front-ends, high efficiency tunable power amplifiers and antenna tuner products.

"Parascan™ tunable capacitors and integrated passive networks using Paratek’s patented form of BST have the potential to be a key enabler of applications in the RF space. However, the manufacturability of the technology is a significant challenge for such applications," said James DiLorenzo, CEO of Paratek Microwave. "Gennum's deep expertise and experience in BST manufacturing in conjunction with our applications and materials expertise have proven to be very effective in realizing commercially viable solutions."

“BST capacitors offer one of the highest capacitance density materials that are commercially available today therefore lending itself to making extremely small capacitor modules. These devices also have excellent high frequency performance and exceptional tunability,” said Scott Haddow, director of Technology Solutions, Audio and Wireless Division, Gennum. “Gennum has optimized its manufacturing methods using BST over the years for its own products and is now beginning to see the demand for this technology in a number of high volume markets.”