Running at crosscurrents with this evolutionary need in the marketplace are economic forces that have caused wireless handsets to be commoditized far sooner than anticipated and a mass consumer that is only willing to allocate limited discretionary funds for wireless services. At present, the added complexity of the 3G smart phones requires "too many" discrete components in their assembly when conventional microelectronic components are used. Given this system of non-technical constraints, macroeconomic analysis suggests that wireless handset OEMs risk stagnation as the pricing power of their products erode while the sophistication of their operational design increases. In order to sustain continued growth in the industry, next generation wireless handset technologies will have to resolve the following fundamental issues:

• Exotic displays, essential to enhanced user experience, consume lots of power so there is a need to reduce power loss the other handset systems.
• Industrial handset design must no longer be constrained by electromagnetic considerations.
• Handsets will have to provide global mobility reconfigurable radio solutions.
• Significant reductions in overall handset manufacturing costs.

What is needed NOW is a solution that will do for passive component integration what the silicon chip did for transistor assemblies! What is needed to achieve this objective is a highly flexible electroceramic lamination technology that can mass produce passive components with tight tolerances and performance values that DO NOT change with temperature. This capability lies at the heart of GigaCircuits' proprietary technology and IP. Reconfigurable Radio Modules GigaCircuits' proprietary integrated antenna and radio module solutions will place our technology at the very heart of future smart phone design and development. The mobile terminal principally consists of four (4) major subsystems: the radio system, the user interface, the cell phone engine, and the electromechanical systems.

Handset OEMs realize large economies of scale when they can deploy major subsystems across all handset models. This is possible for all subsystems except for the radio because its antennas' tuning is sensitive to component layouts and the anticipated use case. This limiting factor imposes severe constraints upon industrial designs and the speed at which new handset variants can be introduced into the marketplace. GigaCircuits' proprietary micro-antenna technology proposes to substitute the conventional broadband antenna and front-end filtering network with an array of miniaturized narrowband "filtering" antennas. A dedicated micro-antenna is tuned to an uplink or downlink channel at a specific frequency band.

The center frequency of the narrow conductance pass bands can be scanned to accommodate regional discrepancies and regulatory uncertainties in the allocated frequency spectrum, thereby enabling software-defined global mobility in a handheld device. These micro-antenna solutions will be insensitive to component layouts, thereby enabling large economies of scale and new industrial design potentials. Furthermore, since the antenna is tuned to provide levels of signal isolation that are comparable to acoustic wave filters, this revolutionary front-end architecture will reduce radio component counts by 60% and deliver a 24% overall power savings to the handset.

The potential for GigaCircuits' proprietary technology solutions to solve fundamental technical and non-technical constraints encountered up and down the wireless supply chain position it as potential platform technology to the industry.