RSS
Here's my weekly report, a summary of industry news worth noting:
Companies and Products
Akoustis Technologies announced the company has been granted four "foundational" patents on single crystal BAW resonator technology.
In a major R&D move, Turkey's ASELSAN is developing 94 GHz SiGe ICs for radar systems, as well as building a GaN wafer fab with Bilkent University.
Ericsson announced 5G plug-ins that will enable operators to test and implement 5G services and gradually evolve their networks to 5G. That was the week's best news for the company, as a Swedish paper reported that Ericsson is planning layoffs of 3,000 to 4,000 this summer, roughly 3 percent of the 115,300 employees Ericsson reported at end of March. And there's more: the company confirmed that the U.S. Department of Justice and Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) are investigating possible Ericsson violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in China.
GigPeak (formerly GigOptix) raised $24.8 million (net) in a stock offering, after selling 13 million shares at $2.00 per share. The company plans to use the funds for acquisitions.
Google Fiber added Dallas to their list of potential cities, which means they will begin assessing the feasibility of deploying the service. While reflecting a commitment of Google resources, this announcement also encourages municipal governments to review and ensure city regulations are "friendly" to Google.
Keysight Technologies and Taiwan's National Applied Research Laboratories signed a memorandum of agreement to collaborate on 5G R&D. The partnership will begin with millimeter wave front-end circuit design and lead to experimental millimeter wave communications networks.
MACOM released two 4 W power amplifiers (PA) for point-to-point radio. The MAAP-011161 covers 7.1 to 7.9 GHz with 22 dB small-signal gain, while the MAAP-011193 covers 7.7 to 8.5 GHz with 20 dB small signal gain. Both PAs provide greater than 35.5 dBm saturated output power, have a third-order intercept point (OIP3) of 46.5 dBm and are in a 7 mm, surface-mount, air cavity package with a copper coin paddle to improve thermal performance.
Nokia received a $1.5 billion award from China Mobile for AirScale base stations and support for China Mobile's move to a cloud network architecture. On the broadband front, the company announced it is buying Silicon Valley startup Gainspeed, which will provide technology to increase the capacity of hybrid fiber coax (HFC) cable networks. As video delivery shifts from traditional broadcast to streaming IP data, cable operators have to revamp their networks to increase data capacity.
SpaceX successfully launched two satellites but lost the booster rocket in a failed landing — what Elon Musk called a "rapid unscheduled disassembly." Pretty amazing video showing the attempted landing:
Markets and Technology
GaN — Strategy Analytics reported that GaN revenue increased 50 percent in 2015, with commercial applications 60 percent of the total. They forecast that base station and defense applications will grow the GaN market to nearly $690 million in 2020.
Cellular — The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), which is a department of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), forecasts that the country's LTE subscriptions will surpass 700 million this year. CAICT estimates that M2M (machine to machine) users, growing at 50 percent annually, will reach 100 million.
At last month's SCWS conference in London, Rajesh Mishra, CTO of Parallel Wireless, discussed the evolution of the cellular radio access network (RAN).
Broadband — A U.S. appeals court backed the FCC on net neutrality, affirming that broadband is a "utility" and that all data traffic should be treated equally.
On another front, the U.S. cable industry has mobilized to thwart the FCC's proposal to open set-top boxes (STB) to competition — just like you can choose your own mobile phone. New York Times article.
Mobile Ecosystem — Market analyst Caroline Gabriel recently reviewed Google's efforts to push the boundaries of the wireless ecosystem.
Tim Berners-Lee and the other founders of the internet recently gathered in San Francisco to brainstorm improvements to the web, 27 years after it was invented. Among the topics discussed: how to distribute web pages without a standard web server and storing data without paying storage fees. If you're interested, you'll find more info at the Decentralized Web Summit website.
Here's one unintended consequence of our mobile technology: when the neighborhood fills with traffic trying to avoid traffic.
If you come across news that you think your colleagues will find interesting, email me at glerude@mwjournal.com.
Have a good week.