Sophia Wireless of Chantilly, VA is using a micromachining approach to build integrated circuits, delivering a product that could offer size, weight, and cost benefits to the radar and aviation markets.

Funded by the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), the company is working to improve interconnect performance in hardware such as microwave systems, wireless telecommunications, and radars. Sophia Wireless has built filters at various frequencies, and integrated transceivers for E-band pointto- point applications using some of these technologies.

MDA predecessor BMDO originally funded Sophia’s work in 2000 to develop a novel interconnection and assembly system for monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), with the technology having the potential to reduce assembly cost while improving interconnect performance. The company, previously known as Virginia Millimeter Wave, received Phase I and Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) awards for the project.

Sophia’s approach to MMIC assembly and interconnection reduces manufacturing steps.

MMICs serve as great amplifiers and frequency-conversion devices, or frequency multipliers, but they lack some parts that would allow them to operate as transceivers — or devices for both sending and receiving signals. Those missing parts, generally referred to as resonant passive devices, include such components as filters, diplexers, resonators, and couplers — larger-scale devices that are typically difficult to include on a MMIC and that require very low-loss propagation of signals. Since MMICs conventionally are optimized for small size and low cost, putting such resonant passive devices on the gallium arsenide (GaAs) area of a MMIC would be an inefficient use of space. So a transceiver that involves a MMIC typically comprises a MMIC plus resonant passive devices that are not integrated into the MMIC.