As complex electronic systems become more prevalent in our daily lives, the demand for high-temperature, high-reliability components continues to increase. Standard electronic components have an operating temperature of -55 °C to 125 °C, but the number of applications requiring functionality above 125 °C is growing. Components in these applications, like capacitors, must maintain their functionality and take the heat (literally and figuratively) while powered. To meet the brief, material and design of these high-temperature components must deviate from today’s standard.

At Knowles Precision Devices, we thrive on working with companies who want to take technically challenging ideas and work through the details to figure out how to turn their seemingly impossible ideas into reality. This is because we are not limited to volume production and have extensive experience making specialty and custom parts. We are also familiar with the challenges associated with delivering high-reliability components as we supply many industries and applications that depend on the consistent functionality of custom-shaped parts. For example, we provide numerous space grade components and we are the only manufacturer who has developed planar array ceramic parts for the International Space Station. 

Mark your calendars for Tuesday, September 14th at 11 am EDT, for our new live webinar - Exploring the Impacts of Today’s SATCOM Industry Trends on Tomorrow’s RF Architecture Designs - presented in conjunction with Microwave Journal.

As a guide to some of the important, yet often overlooked, aspects of mmWave phased arrays, we recently partnered with RFMW and Microwave Journal to produce an eBook covering components, testing, and critical requirements. The eBook features articles from Knowles Precision Devices (KPD) and other industry leaders, including Filtronic, Rohde & Schwarz, and MilliBox.

Many critical military operations around the world are increasingly relying on a variety of electronic warfare devices for a range of threat suppression, detection, and neutralization activities. This means that numerous devices operating across the RF spectrum including low-frequency devices in the VHF band and mmWave devices in the Ka band are necessary. As shown in Figure 1, when many electronic warfare devices are in use, a large number of signals are being sent and received and crossing paths. Therefore, it’s easy for any one of these devices to experience issues with interference if proper filtering techniques are not in place.

At Knowles Precision Devices, we are not trying to be your typical commodity component manufacturer. We want to do things that are hard and help customers solve their most difficult engineering challenges. This is why over the past three decades we have focused on manufacturing high-frequency, high Q components that can function reliably, even in the most demanding applications. Additionally, since every application has different needs, we offer a wide-variety of off-the-shelf catalog solutions, build-to-print services, and even the ability to work closely with customers to create custom thin-film solutions.

We are pleased to announce that the Knowles Corporation recently acquired Integrated Microwave Corporation (IMC), a leader in the design and manufacture of custom precision RF microwave filters and multiplexers for the aerospace, defense, and communications industries. With this acquisition, the Knowles Precision Devices Microwave group can now offer a complete range of RF and microwave filtering solutions that support applications from the VHF to the Ka band. In addition to the small, temperature-stable filters our customers have come to know us for, we can now deliver ceramic and cavity filters for lower frequency and/or higher power applications. The full range of the IMC filter technologies we now offer is shown in the graphic below.

To provide a better understanding of build-to-print in general and the breadth of our offerings, as well as how our thin-film technology can benefit your applications, we’ve put together a Build-to-Print Basics series. In this final post of our Build-to-Print Basics series, we discuss the quality standards we follow to ensure our components are qualified for military and space grade applications as well as the additional testing or spec design we can perform as needed by our customers.

During the first-ever virtual Menlo Micro Switch Summit, Knowles Precision Devices joined John Richardson, founder and president of X-Microwave, and Tom Clickenbeard, applications engineer at Menlo Microsystems, to give a presentation on Prototyping Using X-Microwave’s XM-Blocks with Knowles Precision Devices RF Filters and MEMS Switches.

As early adopters of beamforming technology in the 1960s, aerospace and defense organizations have a lot of experience using the initial large-scale active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) for military radar tracking applications. But these arrays aren’t as convenient for some applications today as the operational frequencies of the targets of interest for many military applications are increasing. This means the wavelengths of the signals that need to be monitored are getting shorter and these radar applications need denser arrays since antenna spacing needs to be set at one half the wavelength. For example, at 25GHz, the wavelength in free space is approximately 12mm (0.47”), leading to half-wave spacing for antennas of 6mm (0.24”). Also, as arrays become denser, the new challenge for RF system designers is avoiding interference in these tighter spaces, especially when transmitting signals.