Forefront RF relocates to The Jeffreys Building on St John’s Innovation Park
Forefront RF has relocated to brand-new premises, complete with a dedicated testing centre, at The Jeffreys Building on St John’s Innovation Park.
Today’s mobile devices rely on fixed radio hardware locked to specific frequency bands and protocols. This inflexible architecture limits scalability in a rapidly evolving connected world. Forefront RF is set to change this with its breakthrough Foretune technology, which unlocks conventional mobile radio front end hardware into fully adaptive, software-defined radio (SDR).
By enabling dynamic reconfiguration on demand, even in complex RF environments, Foretune paves the way for a new generation of wireless devices that are flexible, scalable, and future-ready.
The move to its new home marks a significant milestone in the fabless semiconductor company’s journey, enabling it to scale operations and accelerate development as it enters its next growth phase following the successful completion of a £16m Series A funding round in November 2024.
The establishment of a new HQ marks an important milestone as Forefront transitions from of its start-up roots at St John’s Innovation Centre to a mature phase, focused on scaling and product commercialisation.
Forefront RF was founded in 2020 by Dr Leo Laughlin and Julian Hildersley as a spin-out from the University of Bristol. The company focuses on simplifying radio front-end designs for mobiles, wearables, and IoT devices.
While at St John’s Innovation Centre Forefront patented its Foretune technology which had emerged as the outcome of award-winning research. Foretune’s patented tunable duplexer technology addresses self-interference issues in wireless devices, improving signal quality and reducing component count. The result is reduced physical PCB space and component count, and an increase in the number of supported frequency bands.
Forefront RF, which raised £16m in a Series A finance round in 2024, is working with mobile device manufacturers to integrate its technology into their products. In addition, it is preparing to launch its first-generation product to the cellular-enabled smartwatch market in 2026. As part of its go-to-market strategy, the company is planning a series of field trials in collaboration with leading industry players to validate its technology in real-world environments.
“We’re entering an exciting new chapter,” said Ronald Wilting, CEO at Forefront RF. “Our new space provides the infrastructure and collaborative environment our growing team needs to drive forward product development and the delivery of our cutting-edge RF technology.”
