Freescale Announces New Airfast RF Power Solution Redefining Transistor Performance

Next-generation RF power devices from a market share leader designed to establish a new dimension of wireless performance

July 21, 2011, Seoul, Korea – Freescale Semiconductor (NYSE: FSL, www.freescale.com ), a global leader in semiconductor RF LDMOS power transistors, today announced a new Airfast RF amplifier solution designed to provide wireless infrastructure equipment manufacturers worldwide with a new level of performance and energy efficiency.

The Airfast product family is Freescale's next-generation RF LDMOS product designed to deliver significant performance improvements by implementing a comprehensive range of technologies that provide power density, signal bandwidth, cost efficiency, and linear efficiency/gain. Airfast RF amplifier solutions are expected to offer the widest bandwidth products in the industry and have been developed to support signals with bandwidths exceeding 150 MHz and to support simultaneous operation across multiple communication bands. Designed to provide 5% higher device efficiency than the industry's latest generation LDMOS products, Freescale RF power devices are expected to dramatically improve linearity and deliver 25% higher power density.

"In the past, success in the RF power sector was determined entirely by linear efficiency," said Tom Deitrich, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Freescale's RF, Analog, and Sensor Group. "Today's customers must address a much more complex set of challenges, including multiple standards, signal variability, and extreme bandwidth requirements. Freescale is responding to this paradigm shift with a new product family based on a more comprehensive and holistic system-level approach to RF technology."

Airfast RF power solutions address a multitude of customer needs, including ease of use and flexibility, as well as linear efficiency and performance, through a combination of innovative technology and a system-level platform.

According to market research firm ABI Research, Freescale is a leading provider of RF power solutions, boasting a 57% market share that is significantly ahead of its closest competitors. Freescale Airfast RF power solutions are designed to reinforce and expand this market share advantage through extensive investment and innovation that provide benefits to world-class wireless infrastructure equipment OEMs. Freescale has led the industry in providing cost-effective LDMOS plastic packaging and multi-stage integration, and has demonstrated continued leadership through the industry's broadest portfolio that consistently advances performance while reducing costs and design time.

Airfast RF power solutions are designed to support customers' response to increasingly demanding market requirements. The global wireless network market is changing rapidly, primarily due to the explosive pace of mobile broadband adoption. According to the analysis firm Infonetics Research, the number of mobile broadband subscribers is expected to increase from 558 million in 2010 to over 2 billion in 2015. This trend is placing a massive burden on cellular networks, which have already been experiencing increased signal bandwidth and peak power requirements to keep pace with data demands, along with the rapid expansion of frequencies and modulation formats. Based on these trends, the industry is moving toward introducing multi-band base station equipment capable of eliminating redundancy and increasing the power of large-scale base stations to support ongoing efforts to secure additional signal bandwidth and higher efficiency.

Airfast RF Power Solution continues Freescale’s efforts to utilize cost-effective, state-of-the-art packaging for high-performance RF power transistor applications by applying Freescale’s next-generation overmolding plastic packaging, which is expected to provide up to 20% reduced thermal resistance compared to the first generation.

More information about Freescale's extensive RF power transistor product family can be found at www.freescale.com/files/pr/rf.html .