Atomera Inc. announced it has reached an agreement to license Atomera’s Mears Silicon Technology (MST) technology to a leading semiconductor provider of RF products. Under the terms of this license, the company plans to integrate MST technology into next generation RF products for mobile 5G markets. Atomera’s MST is a patented, quantum-engineered material which can enhance transistors to deliver significantly better performance in today’s electronics.
“This customer executed a license with Atomera to give their designers a clear path to developing even more advanced devices based on Atomera’s MST semiconductor technology,” said Scott Bibaud, president and CEO, Atomera. “With the powerful combination of our partner’s RF technology expertise and their foundry’s manufacturing capabilities, we believe MST can enable new, higher performance devices and products for the 5G cellular market. We are proud to make our breakthrough technologies available to leading fabless semiconductor solution providers and to support them in delivering compelling products around the world.”
The RF device market is growing rapidly. As an example, RF switches are used extensively in wireless systems like mobile phones for routing signals from the antennas to the transmit-and-receive chains. They are one of the highest volume semiconductor devices used today as several of these devices are typically contained in phones or IoT systems. 5G cellular products will incorporate a larger number of RF switches than current models. The RF switch market was valued at $2.9 billion in 2018 and is projected to reach $4.9 billion by 2025, according to InForGrowth. Moreover, according to recent estimates by Gartner, 5G capable phones will grow their share of the market from 10 percent in 2020 to 56 percent by 2023.
Atomera’s integration license provides rights to this fabless company to design MST technology into their advanced RF SOI technology platform. Atomera will work with this large fabless company, and its foundry partner to integrate MST technology into their production environment to deliver significantly better RF products for the mobile 5G market. The license agreement is non-exclusive and the terms are confidential.