By Leo Laughlin, Co-Founder and CTO, Forefront RF
If you tear down a regular smartphone, you’ll find dozens of wireless components in the radio front-end. Each device must incorporate a complicated multimode, multiband architecture capable of handling the wide range of frequency bands and network standards in use today. Such complexity results from the lack of global harmonisation for spectrum allocation.
An American smartphone, for example, might support bands 2, 4, 5, 12, 13, 25, 26, 66, and 71. European models on the other hand might use bands 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 20. Today’s high-end devices typically support 30 plus frequency bands, and this number keeps growing as mobile data usage increases and networks evolve to keep pace.
The radio front-end comprises an array of crystal filters, duplexers, power amplifiers, switches, and matching circuits, arranged to manage different frequencies and standards. This high level of complexity creates enormous challenges for engineers, network operators, and manufacturers alike. As new bands are introduced, each additional component needed to maintain compatibility adds cost, increases power consumption, reduces performance, and expands the PCB footprint. It also means that manufacturers must produce multiple hardware variants for different regions, a process that is both expensive and environmentally unsustainable.
If you were to set out to design a radio front-end starting from scratch, you wouldn’t be aiming to arrive at the implementations in today’s mobile devices; there must surely be a better solution. Instead of duplicating hardware for every possible operating frequency, what if you could build an alternative that dynamically re-configures, thereby simplifying the entire system?
That question became the foundation of my research, and eventually, the foundation of Forefront RF.
How It All Began
My journey started in 2012, when I began my PhD at the University of Bristol. I was exploring a topic that, at the time, felt almost impossible to resolve – enabling RF transmitters and receivers to operate simultaneously on the same frequency band without the transmitter interfering with the receiver. My research focused on signal cancellation technology, which works by subtracting the strong transmit signal from the much weaker receive signal.
During my PhD and the postdoctoral research that followed, I spent around eight years developing and refining this concept. The real breakthrough came when we showed that our cancellation circuits could provide high enough levels of cancellation over wide enough bandwidths. Signal cancellation is the core underlying technology needed for a tunable duplexer that can replace numerous frequency-specific components with a single, compact, reconfigurable circuit. Having shown the efficacy of this building block opened the possibility of creating the reconfigurable RF front-ends I was aiming for.
Taking a leap of faith
By 2019, my research had reached a point where it was no longer just an academic exercise. Solving this long-standing challenge has been a holy grail for the RF industry in recent years, and it became apparent there was a genuine commercial opportunity to overcome one of the biggest bottlenecks in mobile device design. That’s when I decided to take the leap and found Forefront RF. Moving from academia to entrepreneurship wasn’t easy. I’d spent years thinking like a researcher: analysing problems, testing hypotheses, and publishing results. Launching a company required a completely different mindset.
Fortunately, I was accepted onto an Enterprise Fellowship at the Quantum Technologies Enterprise Centre (QTEC);a fantastic programme that provided me with focused training, mentoring, and a salary. This meant I could park my postdoctoral role and focus entirely on building the business.
From Bristol Roots to Cambridge Growth
Forefront RF was founded in 2020. Bristol was a fantastic place to start a deep-tech company. The QTEC programme and wider Bristol tech ecosystem provided not just support and resources, but a real sense of community. As we began to grow, however, one factor became increasingly clear: RF engineering is a highly specialised field, and Cambridge has the largest talent pool in this domain in the UK. I’m also from Cambridge, so it felt natural to bring Forefront RF back to my home city.
The move connected us to one of the most vibrant technology clusters in the world. It also positioned us alongside other innovators in semiconductors, wireless systems, and signal processing, the kind of environment where ideas cross-pollinate quickly and progress accelerates.Around this time, we also secured our first Innovate UK grant and early investment from Cambridge Angels, which gave us the crucial resources needed to transform academic research into real engineering prototypes. Since then, we’ve completed two tapeouts, with our latest design now ready for integration into customer projects. This is a huge milestone that reflects just how far we’ve come.
From startup to scale-up – a new home for Forefront RF
Earlier this year we moved into our new offices in the Jeffreys Building. Having a dedicated space that fits the scale of our ambition has made a huge difference. For example, our new lab now has eight benches, and space for more when needed. This is a big step up from the three we had in our previous office and it means we can run multiple development, test, and characterisation setups in parallel. Over the past 12 months, the team has grown by over 40%, including multiple senior hires: Director of Business Development, Chief People Officer, Senior Project Manager and Director of Engineering.A deep dive into Foretune™
At Forefront RF we believe that radio systems should be reconfigurable and adaptive, not fixed and fragmented. And this is where Foretune™, our unique self-interference cancellation technology, comes in.
Foretune™ is a breakthrough innovation that combines tunable filters with adaptive signal cancellation to create a fully tunable duplexer, removing the need for rigid, frequency-specific hardware in mobile radio front-ends. In essence, it allows one intelligently reconfigurable module to replace multiple fixed components, simplifying the design and reducing component footprint.What excites me most about Foretune™ is what it represents: the idea of a truly global smartphone that can connect seamlessly, irrespective of location. Additionally, by reducing the number of components needed, we’re not only reducing size, but also cutting material waste and power consumption.
Reflecting on the past and looking forward to what’s next
Looking back, the shift from researcher to founder has been both challenging and rewarding. When I began my PhD, I couldn’t have imagined it would lead here, but the constant thread, from university labs to boardroom meetings, has been a drive to solve complex problems and turn new ideas into real-world solutions. At Forefront RF, I’m privileged to work with a team that shares that same determination.
The company has come a long way since those early research days in Bristol, yet the same goal still guides us – to simplify RF front-end design. In doing so, we want to turn global connectivity into a commodity, enabling our customers to add it to any device without the need to design complex custom RF circuits. That idea continues to inspire our work, motivating us to push boundaries, refine our technology, and create products that make global connectivity easy.
At Forefront RF, we’ve always believed that the future of connectivity depends on rethinking the RF front-end.