By Claus Hetting, WiFi NOW CEO & Chairman
Wi-Fi standards may be evolving fast but RF technology has largely stagnated during the past ten years, says QuantalRF’s CEO Dr Ali Fard. The company has spent years reinventing analog RF front end and filter technology using CMOS and is now poised to affect a generational leap forward in Wi-Fi AP and client designs. It’s all about driving power efficiency up and costs down, he says. Here’s how they are doing it.
Wi-Fi standards have advanced tremendously over the past decade but meanwhile, RF technology is lagging way behind. Triple or even quad band architectures with up to 320 MHz channels are common but today’s APs and client devices have hardly improved in terms of power efficiency, says Dr Ali Fard, CEO of QuantalRF, the Switzerland-based company now taking on the challenge.
Improving power efficiency by deploying complex pre-distortion functions in the digital domain – which is a recent trend – may help alleviate non-linearity of FEMs but are instead introducing significant system-level challenges and much longer integration cycles. This approach is also limiting the FEM selection options. It’s a real problem holding back advancements in Wi-Fi devices, he says.
“The power efficiency of FEMs and antennas is a critical performance metric and it has either not changed or actually become worse over the past decade. The result is that costs of APs and client devices are increasing, as thermal management presents a huge and growing problem. QuantalRF is here to deliver the solution to the power consumption problem – and to disrupt the market,” says Ali Fard.
He also says that about half of total AP power is consumed by Wi-Fi chipsets of which the RF FEMs are one dominating source of power dissipation. Meanwhile thermal management contributes up to 50% of the total chipset cost. This is a consequence of the growing research and development efforts needed to maintain the required performance and reliability. Another major challenge is the carbon footprint generated by these products. At the macro level hundreds of millions of home gateways – for example in Europe – consume the equivalent power output of several full size power plants, he says.
QuantalRF’s solution – which is already available on the market – drives the power efficiency of FEMs to ‘groundbreaking levels’ while simplifying the digital and RF FEM interface, he says. This is all happening because the company was founded on a completely different approach to RF semiconductors based on the inventions of QuantalRF co-founder and former NASA scientist, Dr. Forrest J. Brown.
Instead of using compound semiconductor materials such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) QuantalRF is developing cost-effective RF solutions based on standard CMOS and SOI (silicon on insulator) technology – and a unique architecture that bases its circuit designs on techniques that have long since been rejected by most. The company has filed more than two hundred patents and is now ready to disrupt the Wi-Fi FEMs market, he says.
“Low-power regenerative and feedback circuits were invented 100 years ago but then largely abandoned as they were viewed as too difficult to productise because of challenging non-linearities and inherent risks of instability. We took on the challenge and discovered alternative architectures delivering linearised outputs with higher efficiencies. We produce our Wi-Fi FEMs using 12-inch wafers with fully integrated, much smaller die size compared to GaAs FEMs, which means lower production costs,” Ali Fard says.
QuantalRF is headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, with operations as well as research and development taking place in Sweden and the US. QuantalRF’s CEO Dr Ali Fard will be speaking at Wi-Fi World Congress in Geneva on September 23-25. QuantalRF is a WiFi NOW Partner.
/Claus.
