We’ve looked at a couple of companies focusing on improving the performance of cell phone antennas in real time as conditions change. WiSpry (MEMS) and Peregrine (SOS CMOS) were two such examples. But Cavendish Kinetics came into the picture as well, and it turns out that there’s another layer of nuance as to what these companies do.

According to Cavendish, there are two ways to improve antenna performance: tune the impedance and tune the frequency. In the former case, you have an antenna that has to work with multiple frequencies, but is not specifically optimized for all of those frequencies. But as conditions or utilized bands change, the impedance matching may not be optimal. So companies like WiSpry and Peregrine provide capacitor networks that allow real-time tweaking of the impedance to reduce signal loss.

But Cavendish Kinetics claims to be doing something different: the capacitor arrays they create aren’t for adjusting the impedance; they’re for re-centering the frequency of the antenna. While they say that impedance tuning can improve the signal by 20% or so, they claim that they can get a 2X improvement in signal strength simply by tuning the antenna to whichever frequency is in use at a particular time.

We’ll look more at the specifics of how they create their capacitor arrays in a future story, but that’s secondary to the fact that they’re actually trying to solve a different problem than folks that, on the surface, would appear to be doing the same thing.