News

9 March 2009

 

TriQuint fulfills Northrop’s initial production orders for JSF

RF product maker and foundry services provider TriQuint Semiconductor Inc of Hillsboro, OR, USA has fulfilled initial production orders from Northrop Grumman Corp to support the fire-control active electronically scanned array (AESA) radar system for the F-35 Lightning II aircraft.

The new stealth-capable, supersonic, multi-role Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), which will replace fighter and strike aircraft including the F-16 and its variants, is being developed by Lockheed Martin Corp with primary partners Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems. The F-35/JSF program is a multi-nation effort, with participants including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Turkey, the UK and the USA. Israel and Singapore are also engaged as part of a Security Cooperative Participation (SCP) approach. Several thousand aircraft are expected to be delivered by the mid-2030s.

TriQuint has fabricated, tested and delivered power amplifiers, other gallium arsenide devices and bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters for the aircraft’s phased array radar system. The products support Northrop's role in developing radar and other systems for the JSF.

The JSF program is past the mid-point of a 12-year-long system development and demonstration (SDD) phase that includes a variety of application and flight-readiness tests. The products supplied by TriQuint are part of the overall program's low-rate initial production (LRIP) phase, which is being run in concurrence with the SDD phase; TriQuint has shipped an assortment of GaAs ICs for LRIP Phases I and II.

TriQuint applied some of the its latest foundry processes to support Northrop Grumman design objectives for the JSF fire control system, says Dr Gailon Brehm, TriQuint’s director of Defense and Aerospace products marketing. The new processes will play an important role in manufacturing and deploying the phased array radar. “TriQuint shipped a variety of production devices in 2008 and remains actively engaged in meeting our customer’s needs for high-quality components,” adds Brehm. “As we ship devices and as the program moves closer to full production, we expect multi-million dollar revenues.”

*TriQuint will exhibit and present four papers at next week’s GOMACTech conference and exhibition in Orlando, FL, USA (16-19 March).

Search: TriQuint GaAs

Visit: www.triquint.com