UK startup raises funds to ease smartphone multiband integration

Business news | April 3, 2023

By Peter Clarke

Fabless chip company Forefront RF Ltd. (Cambridge, England) has raised £6.7 million to continue its work on RF adaptive passive cancellation.

The company was founded in 2020 by Leo Loughlin (CTO) and Julian Hildersley as a spin-off from the University of Bristol. Ron Wilting was recruited as CEO in May 2022.

The adaptive passive cancellation technology uses software and adaptive switching to replace of BAW and SAW filters and switch banks in 3G to 6G mobile phones. This method of maintaining the accuracy of passive RF cancellation circuits enables a mobile terminal to hear the weakest signals and still transmit at full power without swamping its own receiver. It does this by injecting an inverted version of the transmitted signal in a manner similar to noise cancelling headphones.

The company reckons this should allow for a simplification of the circuits needed to make mobile phones operate across multiple RF bands and protocols from 3G to 6G.

The company has received backing from BGF, alongside existing investors Science Creates Ventures and the Foresight Group. It comes after a round of £1.5 million raised in 2021 (see Cambridge startup applies noise cancellation to RF).

Forefront is launching a tunable duplexer using its technology and has a demonstrator designed to operate across the 600MHz to 1GHz range and show suitability for 4G ad 5G standards.

The FFM61010 front-end multichip module includes the tunable duplexer, power amplifier, low-noise amplifier and is controlled by a standard MIPI RFFE interface. Forefront has developed the software control algorithm used by the application processor or baseband processor.

Forefront expects to start sampling the FF61010 in summer of 2023.