SAN DIEGO, Jan. 14, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- IQ-Analog Corporation, a premier developer of 5G semiconductor mixed-signal ASIC antenna processor technology, announced the appointment of Dr. George Chrisikos to the newly-created role of Chief Operating Officer (COO). As COO, he will be responsible for accelerating product and growth initiatives, innovation, and advancing the company's global commercial strategy.

Dr. Chrisikos has held executive, engineering and entrepreneurial positions in the fabless wireless semiconductor industry for over 20 years. As the Chief Technology Officer at EvoNexus since 2018, he developed ventures in 5G, RF, IoT, artificial intelligence (AI), and high-performance computing.

Formerly, he led advanced technology development efforts at Qualcomm Inc. from 2008-2018 in RF and modem systems, and as a chipset and platform architect. He holds over 120 granted and pending U.S. and international patents in 5G, LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, RF, IoT, and computing algorithms. In his latest role, he was selected to advise Qualcomm's executive leadership on technology strategy, M&A, and Ventures, and to build revenue synergies from technology investments including RF front-end, AI, and autonomous driving.

Previously, he had two successful startup company exits where he held management and engineering leadership roles. He was the engineering director and product line manager at Applied Wave Research (AWR) Inc. from 2003-2008, where he was responsible for architecting and leading the development of a design automation suite for modem and RFIC design that gained widespread industry adoption worldwide. He also led the business and account management of the product line, increasing the revenue many fold and growing the customer base to more than 100 of the leading communications companies including Qualcomm, Broadcom, Nokia, Ericsson, Skyworks, and TriQuint (Qorvo). AWR was acquired by National Instruments, now Cadence Design Systems. Earlier, he spearheaded communication systems engineering and modem design efforts for development of CDMA and Wi-Fi chipsets, leading to an acquisition by Texas Instruments.

He is a Fellow of the IEEE, AAAS, and recipient of the IEEE Kiyo Tomiyasu Technical Field Award. He received the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC), and subsequently completed executive management education at the USC Marshall School of Business.

"We are delighted to welcome George to our team. George brings a wealth of experience and acumen in technology development, innovation, business strategy and product marketing that are sure to benefit the company immensely. IQ-Analog has matured to offer the world's most advanced high-speed data converter technology and George is perfectly suited to guide this technology into commercial applications," said Michael Kappes, CEO, IQ-Analog Corporation.

"IQ-Analog's rich history of innovation and product development is well positioned to address the opportunity and increasing momentum in the commercial 5G markets," said Chrisikos. "I'm excited to accelerate product definition, customer traction, and design wins as the company transitions to this new phase of growth and innovation."

In comparing the efficiency bottlenecks of 4G and 5G systems, the number of converters scales with the number of antenna elements. The increased element count of 5G antennas supporting massive MIMO, active antenna systems (AAS), and millimeter-wave (mmWave) phased-arrays is bringing the converters to the forefront as the bottleneck for power efficiency. The current offerings for discrete-component data converters from the leading competitors far exceed the power consumption and cost budgets needed for high volume 5G deployments.

Furthermore, digital beamforming is needed for an antenna array to simultaneously support multiple users, which is a fundamental requirement for an effective wireless access point. Analog beamforming approaches, widely used to circumvent the power consumption, size and cost burdens, lack this flexibility. Digital beamforming solutions that may be built with commercially available off-the-shelf components are excessively expensive and power-hungry. The lack of suitable components and the inability to integrate all the necessary pieces into ASICs has mired the 5G equipment rollout. The CapEx to invest in the network is therefore excessive until the cost of the hardware comes down dramatically through monolithic integration of data converter systems with ASIC digital processing technology in advanced FinFET manufacturing nodes. As such, the end game is a 5G Modem ASIC with embedded data converters manufactured in advanced FinFET CMOS.

The data converter requirements for 5G are perhaps the most demanding of commercial data converter requirements and integration into an ASIC is conceivable by only a few companies who have invested heavily in internal research and development into FinFET data converter technology. IQ-Analog's FinFET ASIC technology addresses the data conversion bottleneck for 5G modems and transceivers with the development of a fundamentally unique approach to high-speed data conversion known as Traveling Pulse Wave Quantization^® or TPWQ. TPWQ was developed and demonstrated to customers, and was shown to offer fundamentally 5X lower power consumption and 35X smaller die-size than universally adopted successive approximation register (SAR)-architecture converters. Moreover, it is immune to recent patent assertions by Analog Devices Inc. on the SAR-based implementations widely used commercially, particularly in the cellular telecom infrastructure market. IQ-Analog's TPWQ was invented to avoid the SAR architecture in use by conventional systems, and is widely believed to be the only viable alternative.

IQ-Analog is developing a family of antenna processing units (APUs) to accelerate the rollout of 5G networks, addressing both sub-6 GHz and mmWave deployments. The APUs offer TPWQ converter technology coupled with efficient digital processing in a FinFET CMOS process node. The company has proven over several generations of products in adjacent defense markets that with TPWQ it can build the lowest power and smallest form factor APUs. IQ-Analog thus commands a patent-protected integration advantage over potential competition from incumbents and is anticipated to dominate this high volume emerging market segment.

For more information:
Randy Wayland
Tel: +1-858-200-0388
E-mail: [email protected]  

IQ-Analog Corporation is a leading developer of wideband transceiver products servicing markets for advanced wireless communications and radar systems. With over a decade of research and development, our novel approach to high speed data conversion, using temporal-domain signal processing, is at the core of a new class of integrated circuits performing digital antenna processing with unprecedented performance and power efficiency. IQ-Analog is headquartered in San Diego, California. Learn more at http://iqanalog.com.

SOURCE IQ-Analog Corp.

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