The most important applications in terms of sales were GaAs-based power amplifiers and antenna control solutions used in mobile phones (including smartphones), WiFi RF front-ends and components used in wireless infrastructure equipment.

[7] The company was founded in 1991 in Greensboro, North Carolina by William J. Pratt, Powell T. Seymour and Jerry D. Neal, all of whom were former employees of Analog Devices.

[8] GaAs HBT emerged as a leading technology for high-performance RF applications, such as power amplifiers and small signal devices used in cellular handsets.

[8] RFMD initially supplied ICs for Qualcomm's digital cell phones, and by 1998 had gained Samsung, Nokia, and LG as customers, as production continued to increase.

[30] In early 2001, RFMD bought RF Nitro Communications (RF Nitro)[31] that was founded in Charlotte, NC by Dr. James Shealy[32] in 2000 using technology licensed from Cornell to produce on 100mm(4inch) wafers, advanced wide-band gap semiconductor materials and RFIC products (InGaP HBT, GaAs PHEMT, and GaN HEMT on both silicon carbide and sapphire substrates) typically implemented in laser diodes that were further incorporated into broadband wireless and fibre-optic end products.

[33][32] One notable advantage at the time to the Cornell licensed technology was the ability to obtain high semiconductor growth rates at low temperatures.

[38] In November 2012, RFMD acquired Los Gatos, California-based Amalfi Semiconductor to enter the CMOS power amplifier (PA) market.

[5] Rocky Holding will trade on the NASDAQ, and RF Micro's Robert Bruggeworth will be president and CEO, while TriQuint's Ralph Quinsey will be chairman.

[5] The deal was projected to close in the second half of the year, after which the companies will execute a one-for-four reverse stock split resulting in 145 million shares outstanding.

[40] This puts such companies at risk of underutilization of their manufacturing capacity when demand falls, which has frequently affected RFMD and impacted its profitability.

[40] Competitors Skyworks and Avago have seen their GaAs revenues increase consistently,[40] while RFMD experienced lower sales in 2011 and 2012 and lost market share.

[47] RFMD's Polaris chipsets, sold from 2004 to 2011, were aligned with certain established but declining baseband architectures, including Freescale[48] and essentially competed with RF transceiver solutions from growing mobile phone baseband/application processor companies Qualcomm and MediaTek, which were quickly becoming dominant and used their own RF transceiver solutions as part of their reference designs alongside the baseband/application processor, with the front-end/PA component sockets remaining open to GaAs chip manufacturers.

[44] However, Qualcomm, the dominant provider of the silicon chip content in mobile phones, has made significant investments in this area and reported volume shipments of a 3G/4G front-end solution using CMOS-based power amplifier technology in February 2014.

[53] Proliferation of CMOS-based solutions increases competition from CMOS RF companies such as Peregrine Semiconductor as well as mobile phone SoC and chipset providers such as Qualcomm and others, and has the potential to significantly reduce the addressable market for GaAs-based devices.