About Us

AgileMMIC Inc. is the result of research activities developed in the iRadioLab of the University of Calgary over the past 25 years by one of the most renowned research teams in the area of RF front-end and RF power amplifier design and modelling. These activities were supported by Alberta Innovates through a strategic chair in Intelligent RF Radio Technologies and Canada Research Chair Program.

AgileMMIC has developed a unique set of intellectual property and trade secrets to design discrete and monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) RF front-ends and power amplifiers (PAs) for the wireless and satellite communication, and synthetic aperture RADAR (SAR) applications that offer the best linearity, power efficiency, and bandwidth.

Mission

AgileMMIC aims to transform the way RF frontends are designed for the next generations of wireless and space communication systems. Introduction of new circuit architectures and design techniques would make the integration of RF frontends using high-end semiconductor technologies affordable to replace conventional distributed designs.

AgileMMIC provides design and technology of monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMIC) and is a pioneer that have successfully developed Gallium Nitride RF frontend circuitry.  Proprietary power amplification technology provides support for mmWave, MMIC, and Massive MIMO deployments.

Vision

The next generations of wireless and satellite communication are moving toward more broadband (instantaneous bandwidths exceeding hundreds of MHz) and complex (number of active antenna elements in the three digits range) RF and millimeter-wave front-ends using massive MIMO and active phased-array transceivers. Starting from the 5th generation (5G) and beyond:

  • Widely used PA architectures such as Doherty PAs are over 85 years old. They reached their limits in terms of bandwidth and linearizability.
  • Discrete PA modules in massive MIMO front-ends would result in a very complex, large size, and costly solution, which cannot be implemented in practical scenarios.
  • Commonly linearization techniques such as digital predistortion, which are over 20 years old, require complex and fast computation. This increases the power consumption, hardware cost, and delay to respond to changes in front-end behavior.

Innovative approaches and apparatus for power efficiency enhancement and signal quality improvement are required to develop and deploy 5G+ radios.

Innovation

AgileMMIC technology is based on patent innovative circuits architectures and design techniques to design RF front-end circuits with superior performance compared to competition:

  • Up to 4 times broader band
  • Up to 30% more energy efficient
  • Up to 30% lower cost and size

all while maintaining good signal quality and linearizability.