The following news items caught my eye last week:

Companies and Products

Alcatel-Lucent is shipping a picocell designed to improve LTE and 3G cellular coverage in the home.

ANADIGICS signed an agreement to be acquired by GaAs Labs for $32 million. The agreement provides a 25 day window for ANADIGICS to negotiate a better offer from another party. More details and analysis here.

Anaren developed a family of passive components for RF energy applications at 2.4 GHz. The family comprises two 3 dB hybrid couplers, a 30 dB directional coupler and a termination.

Yes, Virginia, isotropic antennas do exist. Anritsu introduced three, covering 9 kHz to 6 GHz.

Cisco and Ericsson announced a complementary partnership that they claim will add $1 billion in new revenue for each company by 2018. Although not advertised as such, the collaboration will counter threats from Huawei and the soon-to-be-combined Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent (Wall Street Journal summary). Announcing the partnership, the companies' CEOs discussed why they are teaming, rather than going it alone or buying each other.

Custom MMIC released two new products:

• Balanced LNA covering 9 to 18 GHz. At 13.5 GHz, the die achieves 1.5 dB noise figure, 22 dB gain and 13.5 dBm output power at 1 dB compression.
• SPDT switch die, covering DC to 26 GHz with 1.4 dB insertion loss, 40 dB isolation and >21 dBm 1 dB compression power handling.

Facebook's Q3 revenue grew 41 percent year-over-year to $4.5 billion, with 78 percent of ad revenue from mobile. Facebook reported 1.4 billion monthly active mobile users. New York Times article.

Fairview Microwave announced four limiting amplifiers covering various EW bands between 1 and 18 GHz. The amplifiers achieve 15 to 19 dBm output power with 40 to 80 dB gain.

Huawei is being challenged by slow growth in infrastructure and now the new Ericsson-Cisco alliance. That's the view of Doug Young at Young's China Business Blog.

MACOM received an order from Lincoln Laboratory for their Scalable Planar ARray (SPAR) tiles, to be used in the first full-scale multifunction phased array radar (MPAR). Lincoln Lab also selected MACOM's SPAR for DARPA's "arrays at commercial timescale" (ACT) program.

Microsemi is trying to woo PMC-Sierra from the altar with Skyworks. According to Microsemi, PMC-Sierra's board now favors Microsemi's offer.

MIT is establishing an "innovation node" in Hong Kong. Scheduled to open this summer, the facility which will serve as a test bed for quickly commercializing ideas.

Following regulatory approvals, NXP and JAC Capital formed a joint venture called WeEn Semiconductors for bipolar power devices. JAC Capital owns 51 percent of the JV. This transaction is separate from NXP's sale of their RF power business to JAC Capital, which is being reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS).

Raytheon delivered the 200th AESA radar for the F-15. The radar is proving to be three times more reliable than mechanically-scanned radars. Raytheon's AESA radars fly on the F-15, F-16, F/A-18 and B-2; more than 800 AESA radars have been delivered since 2000.

Resonant released quarterly financials with an update on their filter development efforts. Their "tunable" (two-band) demo was pushed into 2016 to allow engineering to focus on designs that will generate near-term revenue.

Markets and Technology

Point-to-Point Radio — Microwave Journal interviewed Karolina Wikander, head of microwave at Ericsson, on trends in the point-to-point radio. Read the interview.

Space Exploration — Data from the New Horizons flyby of Pluto keeps trickling in, and discoveries from the mission are astounding, from ice volcanoes to twirling moons. Read NASA's summary.

Automotive — On a humorous note, a Google self-driving car was pulled over by the police for driving too slowly. The officer let it off with just a warning. New York Times article.

If you come across news items that you think I should include in this weekly summary, please send them to me at glerude@mwjournal.com.

Have a good week.