Akoustis Announces Industry’s First 6.5 GHz XBAW Filter for Emerging WiFi 6E

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Akoustis Technologies, Inc., an integrated device manufacturer (IDM) of patented bulk acoustic wave (BAW) high-band RF filters for mobile and other wireless applications, announced today it introduced the industry’s first ultra-wideband 6.5 GHz XBAW^TM filter that covers the entire U-NII-5 to U-NII-8 bands of the new WiFi 6E unlicensed spectrum.

When paired with the Company’s 5.5 GHz XBAW™ filter announced in early June, Akoustis can now provide the industry’s first complete BAW-based micro filter solution for the emerging WiFi 6E standard. The Company expects to announce sampling later this quarter and to have fully qualified 5.5 and 6.5 GHz XBAW^TM filters by early calendar 2021. The potential market for the Company’s WiFi 6E filter solutions include dual-band to quad-band CPE WiFi routers as well as mobile handsets, laptops, tablets, and gaming devices as our wafer-level-packaging is completed later this year. 

Jeff Shealy, Founder and CEO of Akoustis, stated, “In anticipation of the next generation WiFi standard which promises to deliver higher data rates, we invested in the development of the industry’s first tandem ultra-wideband 5.5 and 6.5 GHz BAW-based coexistence filter solution covering the two WiFi 6E bands within the 5.1 to 7.1 GHz unlicensed spectrum. The engineering challenges in delivering these new filters include high frequency operation, ultra-wide bandwidth and high adjacent band rejection - leveraging key performance features of our XBAW™ filter technology.” Mr. Shealy continued, “The interest in WiFi 6E, and particularly in our new WiFi 6E filters, has grown dramatically over the past few months. By having the industry’s only 5.5 and 6.5 GHz tandem BAW-based filter solution, we expect that WiFi 6E will become one of our primary revenue growth drivers moving forward.”

The new 6.5 GHz filter module announced today covers the 5.9 to 7.1 GHz spectrum with low power loss in the passband. This new RF filter solution will be offered as a standard catalog product, available to all potential customers. With ultra-wide bandwidth coverage of 1.2 GHz, it is the widest bandwidth BAW-based micro filter product available in the market for the 5.9 to 7.1 GHz unlicensed WiFi spectrum with fractional bandwidth of 18.2%. The 6.5 GHz high-performance XBAW^TM filter module coexists with the existing 5 GHz WiFi band, outperforming the coexistence of all traditional LTCC and dielectric resonator filter technologies.

The 6.5 GHz filter is designed and manufactured using the Company’s patented XBAW^TM process and manufactured in the Company’s Si-MEMS Wafer Fab located in Canandaigua, NY. For sample and sales inquiries please contact: sales@akoustis.com.

The FCC announced in April 2020 the approval of 5.9 to 7.1 GHz for unlicensed use, which is the largest spectrum addition since the FCC allocated unlicensed spectrum for WiFi in 1989. The next generation of WiFi that is expected to use these new frequency bands is called WiFi 6E. This approval will create another significant new band, or combination of bands, over the next several years.

Akoustis has added 14 filters to its product catalog including a 5.6 GHz WiFi filter, a 5.2 GHz WiFi filter, a 5.5 GHz WiFi-6E filter, three small cell 5G network infrastructure filters including two Band n77 filters and one Band n79 filter, a 3.8 GHz filter and five S-Band filters for defense phased-array radar applications, a 3.6 GHz filter for the CBRS 5G infrastructure market and a C-Band filter for the unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) market. The Company is also developing several new filters for the sub-7 GHz bands targeting 5G mobile device, network infrastructure, WiFi CPE and defense markets.