An Evolving Wireless Landscape

The mobile communications market is one of the worlds largest in terms of dollars generated, units shipped and value created, in both services and products. It is estimated that there are over 3.5 billion mobile phone subscribers worldwide¹ and yet the market continues to expand and diverge as new services are added.

The advent of WiFi and VoIP enterprise service looks set to challenge the existing landscape and new entrants such as the Broadband Wireless network proposed by WiMAX are never far away. The demand for more services at higher speeds and ever-lower costs has led to a proliferation of wireless standards, each vying for supremacy. Similarly the demand for service has put severe strains on existing spectrum capacity, leading to the inevitable expansion into new frequency bands, often with a differentiated service in each.

The net result has been the evolution of multi-band and more recently, multi-standard wireless devices serving the needs of mobile communications and mobile computing applications.

However, the RF challenge has grown with the number of frequency bands and the number of technologies deployed in those bands. Despite significant advances in silicon engineering, transceiver technology still cannot incorporate RF front-end component such as filters, which have resolutely resisted integration so far.

Creating innovative solutions to these complex integration challenges is the problem that we set out to solve at WiSpry.