Q: Given the current economic crisis affecting the U.S. – which will certainly have international repercussions – how do you think the markets you serve may be impacted? How do you and your company plan to address this?

A: We are in an economic environment without precedent. However, two outcomes are obvious: uncertainty throughout the supply chain will dramatically reduce operating visibility; and tight credit markets will impact most capital intensive activities, especially new system rollouts. The resulting slowdowns will be market and territory specific. However, we anticipate the expansion of mobile communications (i.e., wireless) into virtually all applications to continue at a rapid pace. Peregrine will focus on tight management of resources during the near-term period of uncertainty while maintaining our investment in new products and technology to be ready for the inevitable longer-term expansion.

Q: At the last MTT-S show, “LTE” was added to “WiMAX” as the killer app for 2009. Would you agree with this, or do you have something else in mind?

A: To me, 2009 seems like a very aggressive rollout date for either application being “killer.” This is even more true today than it was in June at the IMS show, given the current state of the global financial markets. Ultimately, LTE will be an absolutely killer app – but I think it is a few more years off in the future. When it arrives, however, Peregrine’s products will bring some compelling advantages to this market.

Q: What do you feel are the greatest opportunities for manufacturers in either the commercial or military markets?

A: We see strong opportunities in industrial and mobile handset markets. Of course everything is tempered by the short-term financial turmoil discussed earlier. We support our military customers through commercial off the shelf (COTS) products that use our standard technology.

Q: Which of the past year’s developments or emerging technologies has you most excited?

A: Peregrine has been focused on highly integrated RFICs based on our UltraCMOS™ silicon-on-sapphire technology. During the past year, this revolutionary process enabled us to bring to market high-performance products such as the SP9T cellular antenna switches, Digital Step Attenuators for cellular infrastructure, and ATE switches for test equipment. We are seeing widespread demand for increasing levels of RF integration, and our UltraCMOS process enables products with the best combination of performance, integration and size of any high-volume technology available today. As well, UltraCMOS is enabling us to remove critical design roadblocks which the industry has faced for years. For example, Peregrine recently announced DuNE™ Technology, a new design methodology that solves a fundamental challenge in mobile antenna tuning. Existing design options such as MEMS and BST (for cellular handsets) or varactor diodes and switch-based tuning (for mobile-TV) are limited, especially as designers look to integrate more cellular bands and additional mobile services. DuNE enables highly linear, digitally tunable capacitors with the high levels of integration, power handling and performance required for these complex mobile systems – and Peregrine continues to change the way RF is designed.

Q: How would you rate the health of the microwave industry as we near the end of the decade?

A: In the short-term our industry has to deal with uncertainty, but in the long term we don’t see an industry with better prospects. We firmly believe that in the future virtually every device with either a power cord or a battery will have multiple radios embedded. After all, who would have predicted car keys with radios twenty years ago? This trend will drive our industry throughout the next decade.

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