Resonant is a late-stage development company that has created an innovative
software, intellectual property, or IP, and services platform that has the ability
to increase designer efficiency, reduce the time to market and lower unit costs
in the designs of filters for radio frequency, or RF, front-ends for the mobile
device industry. The RF front-end, or RFFE, is the circuitry in a mobile device
responsible for analog signal processing and is located between the device’s
antenna and its digital circuitry. The software platform we are developing is
based on fundamentally new technology that we call Infinite Synthesized Networks®,
or ISN®, to configure and connect resonators, the building blocks of RF
filters. Filters are a critical component of the RF front-end used to select
desired radio frequency signals and reject unwanted signals. Our ISN® platform
allows us to develop unique, custom designs that address the increasing complexity
of the RFFE due to carrier aggregation (the combining of multiple frequencies
into a single data stream to increase throughput through higher data rates),
or CA, by both reducing the size of the filter and improving performance. Our
goal is to utilize our ISN® platform to support our customers in reducing
their time to develop complex filter and module designs, to access new classes
of filter designs, and to do it more cost effectively.
We are commercializing our technology through the creation of filter designs
that address the problems in the high growth RFFE industry created by the growing
number of frequency bands in mobile devices. The worldwide adoption of Long
Term Evolution, or LTE, as the global standard, and the use of mobile devices
to access the Internet, has resulted in massive proliferation of frequency bands
which, when combined with CA for higher data rates and multiple input multiple
output, or MIMO, has resulted in an ever-increasing number and complexity of
filters in the RFFE. We have developed and continue to expand a series of single-band
designs for frequency bands presently dominated by larger and more expensive
bulk acoustic wave, or BAW, filters. We are also developing multiplexer filter
designs for two or more bands to address the CA requirements of our customers.
We are using our ISN® platform to efficiently integrate these designs into
RF modules for our module customers. Finally, we are developing unique filter
designs, enabled by ISN®, to replace multiple filters and associated componentry
for many bands, with higher performance. Currently, we are leveraging ISN®
to develop these designs targeted for either the Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW)
or Temperature Compensated, Surface Acoustic Wave (TC-SAW) manufacturing processes.
In order to succeed, we must convince RFFE suppliers that our filter designs
can significantly reduce the size and cost of their products.
We believe licensing our designs is the most direct and effective means of validating
our ISN® platform and related IP libraries to address this rapidly growing
market. Our target customers make part or all of the RFFE. We intend to retain
ownership of our designs, and we expect to be compensated through license fees
and royalties based on sales of RFFE filters that incorporate our designs. We
currently do not intend to manufacture or sell any physical products or operate
as a contract design company developing designs for a fee.
Our typical customer engagement process begins with the execution of a Joint
Development Agreement, or JDA, and License Agreement, or LA, which provides
for a typical development cycle of six to nine months, for specific bands. Depending
on the complexity of the design, we estimate that initial samples of products
to original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, will occur typically within nine
to thirty-six months following execution of a license agreement. We classify
these new designs as either ISN Ready (9-12 months), ISN Pilot (12-18 months),
ISN Advanced (18-36 months) or ISN Development (Custom). It is following these
development cycles that designs are manufactured and sampled to OEM customers.
OEMs can take from three to six months, or longer, to qualify a design as fit
for use, reliable and ready for mass production. The point at which an OEM begins
taking product from our customers in mass production is typically when royalty
revenues would begin. Our customer agreements typically provide for upfront
design fees and royalty payments for each unit sold using our filter designs
and typically last for a minimum of two years, and in many cases for the life
of the design.
The need for duplexers and other filters in the RFFE of mobile devices is
growing rapidly due to rising consumer demand for always-on wireless broadband.
Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are quickly becoming the primary
means of accessing the internet. According to Cisco, worldwide mobile data traffic
grew 63% in 2016 and will grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 47% from
2016 to 2021.
The world is progressing toward ubiquitous RF coverage in which almost all
devices will be connected, most wirelessly. Technology experts predict that
by 2021 there will be over 26 billion connected devices operating worldwide
and we will be measuring mobile usage in Exabytes. This overwhelming demand
for wireless data has driven the carriers and regulators to open new spectrum
bands.
This substantial and rapid increase in bands has created several significant
problems, including a corresponding increase in the number of filters and duplexers
in mobile devices. Traditional RF front-end solutions typically require one
duplexer for each frequency band. The most recent iPhones support coverage for
19 FDD-LTE and 5 TDD-LTE bands, in addition to support for previous wireless
technology generations, 3G and 2G, with each band requiring a filter, either
as an individual filter, a duplexer or a quadplexer, depending upon the spectrum
and CA requirements. This increase in number and complexity of filters is dramatically
driving up the cost of RF front-ends. In the latest global smartphones, filters
and duplexers comprise more than half of the cost to the RF front-end, according
to a Barclays analysis.
The growing number of filters is also increasing the total size of the RF front-end.
In some cases, size constraints require the OEM to fragment its product offering
into multiple versions, each with a limited set of filters customized for a
particular geographic region. Multiple versions of a mobile product increases
manufacturing, inventory and distribution costs. In addition, consumers can
find it difficult to roam between carriers and/or countries due to this splintering
of bands and phone models. Phone OEMs would prefer to make one version of a
product containing a full set of filters that can be electronically selected
as required for a particular carrier network.
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