TriQuint's Newest Filters Solves 4G Challenging Interference Issues

Headquartered in Hillsboro, Oregon is TriQuint Semiconductor, Inc., a company dedicated to research and development (R&D) of solutions for next-generation technology. According to Ralph Quinsey, president and CEO, the company is committed “to zero defects, continuous improvement, quality and reliability to meet or exceed customer requirements.”

TriQuint manufactures several high-performance RF components, including amplifiers, switches, filters and duplexers, frequency converters and various integrated modules and brings them to the commercial market. Its evolution of filters based on surface acoustic and bulk acoustic wave technologies (SAW and BAW), as well as for temperature-compensated surface acoustic wave technology (TC-SAW), has made a noticeable impact in the case of mobile phones.

These three advanced Wi-Fi/4G coexistence filters are able to keep RF signals in their proper spectrum band, isolated from one another, thereby preventing problems such as dropped calls (due to an increasingly crowded RF spectrum, making interference issues even worse) while maintaining high RF performance requirements, TriQuint's R&D Director Michael Liu explained.

Liu says the company has been able to raise performance expectations of insertion loss and rejection. The three new filters include two LTE filters with advanced BAW technology (a 2595 MHz RF BAW Band 38 filter and a 2350 MHz RF BAW Band 40 filter) and a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi / LTE diplexer filter, also with advanced BAW technology.

According to Liu, the newly developed filters, designed for high-volume smartphones, were needed to mitigate the resulting interference issues on today’s existing Wi-Fi spectrum, which has little or no band guards. The new RF solutions are intended to enable 4G mobile broadband communications to support more frequency bands.

TriQuint explained that 4G connections are “expected to explode nine-fold to 1 billion by 2017, [and] demand is growing for advanced BAW filter technology to solve challenging interference issues.” That’s why, the company said, it has committed itself to solving tough RF problems for the global mobile internet industry. TriQuint is currently developing a better RF design for today’s increasingly sophisticated wireless devices: next-generation 3G/4G smartphones.