RDA has developed high performance CMOS-based radio-frequency and mixed-signal technology and gallium arsenide-based technology. CMOS, which stands for “complementary metal oxide semiconductor,” is the most common technology for manufacturing semiconductors, and it makes use of silicon, which is plentiful and relatively cheap, for wafer manufacturing. Gallium arsenide wafer manufacturing is more expensive, but it has advantages for designing semiconductors for certain products, including particularly power amplifiers.

A wireless system-level product is typically partitioned into three major components: the controller, the radio-frequency component, and the digital signal processing component. RDA believes that the primary complexity of creating larger wireless system-level products is with the radio-frequency and digital signal processing components. The majority of RDA’s engineers specialize in radio-frequency and digital signal processing design. Implementation-level techniques for its radio-frequency and digital signal processing blocks are constantly refined every time RDA tapes out a new product, allowing it to further improve device performance and lower die sizes. RDA believes that it has considerable expertise in both front-end design and back-end layout. In radio frequency design, front-end design (i.e., circuit topology) determines the ultimate performance limitation, and back-end layout determines to what degree this performance can be achieved.