WJ Communications carried more than forty years of radio engineering into the wireless boom. It grew out of Watkins-Johnson, a Silicon Valley electronics firm founded in 1957 that built microwave and defense equipment. After a recapitalization led by the private equity firm Fox Paine, the company refocused on radio frequency parts for wireless networks. It went public in August 2000. Phone carriers were racing to build networks, and RF chips were in high demand.

Amplifiers for Base Stations

WJ bet that the wireless build-out would need large numbers of high-performance amplifiers and mixers. Its parts sat inside the base stations that carried mobile calls and inside broadband equipment. The company had decades of RF know-how from its parent. Its fortunes depended on the spending cycles of a few big equipment makers. When they ordered, WJ grew. When they stopped, WJ shrank.

A Long Fade

WJ priced its IPO at $16 a share in August 2000, the top of its expected range, and listed on Nasdaq as WJCI. Within a year, the telecom slump cut orders sharply. The company shrank, moved to outsourced manufacturing and kept selling RF parts to a narrower market. In 2008 TriQuint Semiconductor acquired WJ Communications and brought its RF know-how into a larger wireless chip company.

Cover: Signal Tower on Elk Mountain, Maryland, Timothy O'Sullivan. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a signal tower on a mountain (radio).