Executive Interview: Paul Hart, senior VP and GM of NXP's new RF power business

Now that the acquisition is complete and the companies’ product lines are settling into coexistence, how do you feel your product line will fit into this new portfolio?

First, I need to clarify the products under my purview, which we define as “RF power,” are based on LDMOS and GaN technologies. They serve applications that require from about 10 watts to more than 1000 watts, which differentiates them from very low power applications such as smartphones and other battery-powered devices.

My business’ products integrate nicely with NXP’s other RF technologies, as well as digital products such as the AFD4400 digital front-end processor, for which I am also responsible. This digital front-end is tightly integrated with our second-generation Airfast RF power transistors and RFICs.

What are the core applications you target with your product line?

For communications applications, they range from cellular networks, for which NXP is the leading supplier of LDMOS RF power transistors and RFICs, to land mobile and public safety communications, which have been important markets for us for many years. Other applications include industrial systems that heat, dry, cure or weld products manufactured in various industries; FM and TV broadcast; avionics and air traffic control and medical instruments for electrosurgery, MRI, cancer surgery and skin treatment.

I believe the intrinsic capabilities of LDMOS will allow it to remain the most competitive choice for these applications for many years, joined by GaN in communications applications at frequencies above 2.5 GHz.

We’ve heard a lot recently about LDMOS transistors replacing magnetrons in microwave ovens. Is this a major market for your products?

Absolutely. We were a pioneer in developing this application, which promises to be an important new market in the coming years. It’s really the first substantive change in microwave oven technology since it was first invented at Raytheon in 1946.

Most important, RF cooking is more than extending the longevity of microwave ovens by replacing magnetrons with transistors as the source of RF energy. Rather, solid-state devices make it possible to expand the functionality of this appliance from simply heating, reheating and defrosting food to a versatile RF cooking system in which multiple types of food can be cooked simultaneously with precise results. It’s actually a new type of oven rather than just a modernized microwave.

We’ve created an entire ecosystem — called Sage — to support RF cooking. Sage streamlines the path to creating this type of appliance, including our bench-in-a box RF power tool that allows designers with minimal RF experience and limited measurement capability to evaluate RF power transistors. Like the AFD4400, it’s an example of how our RF power products can be integrated with embedded controllers, IoT interfaces and other NXP products to achieve a complete solution.

Tell us about the AFD4400 digital front-end processor.

I think it’s a real differentiator for the design of wireless radio systems, from macro and micro cells to active antenna systems. The AFD4400 lets designers program and optimize an entire radio, via software alone. They can add frequency bands, change output power levels and signal bandwidths and make other modifications without changes to hardware, as it is fully software defined. It essentially eliminates hardware logic design, which is one of the most tedious and time-consuming steps in radio development with ASIC and FPGA architectures.

The AFD4400 has a large array of vector processing cores to execute almost every function, using floating-point rather than fixed-point arithmetic. That’s a huge benefit for designers, because they can transition much more easily from algorithm development to actual hardware. The processor is also designed to fully exploit the performance characteristics of the Airfast RF power devices with a minimum amount of design work.

Will you continue to address the aerospace and defense market?

Yes, definitely. This is a compelling market in which we first began to participate back in 2013, with a team dedicated exclusively to meeting the needs of military radar, communications, avionics and other systems.

The defense market is very different from the commercial sector, especially because the Department of Defense requires components to be available for 15 years. Except for the auto industry, this is typically not the case for other markets NXP serves. So all of our standard products sold to the defense market, which consist of both LDMOS and GaN devices, meet this requirement. We’ve had an excellent response to these efforts, and I expect this will continue to accelerate.

How would you sum up NXP’s overall RF advantages today?

There’s no question to us that the merger has produced huge new opportunities for us in the RF power domain. The company’s product portfolio is much larger and more complete, as are the markets we can serve and the technologies we have available. Our increased scale will allow us to further develop our product roadmaps and provide customers with enhanced solutions. Now we will focus on leveraging all of these opportunities for the benefit of our customers, which is really exciting.

For example, in addition to RF power products, NXP’s RF product lines include LNAs, I/Q modulators, mixers, oscillators, switches, VGAs and a host of other devices. The applications we serve include wireless infrastructure, AM/FM receivers, RFID, NFC, cable modems, Wi-Fi access points, VSAT, GPS, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2X), ZigBee and many more.

NXP was a major player in nearly all areas of the RF market, and the merger between NXP and Freescale has only strengthened that position.