Mobile filter start-up Resonant Inc. announced that the company signed a development and licensing agreement for two quadplexers with a new customer — Resonant’s seventh — a fabless RFIC provider for the mobile RF front-end market (RFFE) in China. Terms of the agreement, including design acceptance, milestone payments and royalties, have been established but were not disclosed.

The two quadplexers will be designed using standard surface acoustic wave (SAW) processes from Resonant’s existing SAW foundry partners. Backend processing and packaging will also use existing suppliers.

George Holmes, CEO of Resonant, said, “Our seventh customer is an established provider of key components into the Chinese market, servicing an extensive customer base which includes several tier one handset vendors. Working closely with our existing foundry partners, we are using the fabless model to capitalize on the quickly expanding RFFE market, potentially disrupting the supply chain by enabling new market entrants with the potential for faster design times and lower cost.”

Resonant’s business model is creating software tools, IP and licensable blocks that enable innovative filter designs for the RFFEs used in mobile devices. Because of the proliferation of frequency bands, filters are an increasingly critical component, particularly with the implementation of carrier aggregation to increase data rates.

Royalties from production filter shipments will be the principal source of Resonant’s revenue and growth, and the company expects the value of their filters to justify royalties of 10 percent or greater.

During a call with analysts on June 22, Holmes confirmed that one of Resonant’s filter designs has been designed in a “niche” OEM handset and is generating the company’s first royalty revenue this quarter, which is expected to grow during the rest of the year. Holmes said Resonant now has more than 30 duplexer and quadplexer development projects under contract.