Icana discontinues RF R&D in Leuven

At Icana in Leuven, around 25 R&D jobs are being made redundant as the RF specialist has decided to transform the site into a sales office for the EMEA market. According to a spokesperson, all the beamforming IC developments for 5G mm-wave that were done in Belgium are being consolidated in the company’s headquarters in Taiwan. At the same time, they’re expanded to include satcom applications.

Icana was founded in 2017 as Arqana by the Flemish tech entrepreneur Glenn Vandevoorde, with funding from Asian investors. It established its HQ in Taiwan and a Si-CMOS innovation center in Leuven, near Imec. In 2022, it was bought by Hon Hai Technology Group, better known as Foxconn, and merged with the Californian IC design house Achernartek, already fully owned by the world’s largest electronics manufacturer. Rebranded as Icana, the resulting global RF component supplier went on to support Foxconn and third-party customers in wireless telecom.