About Us
Company History | Technology & Engineering | Facilities & Equipment

Facilities and Equipment

HXI is located in a 17,000 square foot facility in the Ward Hill East Business Park in Haverhill, Massachusetts.  This location provides engineering and manufacturing space for millimeter wave components & subsystems, as well as for our Gigalink millimeter wave radios that are sold by Proxim Wireless.  We moved to this larger facility in November 2005 to accommodate the growth that we have been experiencing in both product areas.  In addition to our previous facilities and equipment, we have incorporated manufacturing assets from the former Telaxis plant in South Deerfield, Massachusetts (see Company History page).  We also have a fully instrumented Harris model 1602A compact antenna range (see photo below left) with operation to beyond 100 GHz and a 30” x 20” quiet zone located at BTP Systems, 290 Moody Street, Ludlow, Massachusetts.  The range is available for use by outside customers on a contract basis.  In addition to the compact range, we maintain a short range radio link test facility, complete with BER test capability, in our main facility.  Other test equipment includes an 8510 network analyzer and an array of synthesized signal generators, spectrum analyzers and scalar analyzers, as well as high speed oscilloscopes, power and noise measurement equipment and numerous waveguide test lines (couplers, precision attenuators, etc.) to support testing to 110 GHz.  Temperature plates and chambers, as well as a humidity chamber and burn-in center facilitate the environmental and reliability testing of our products.

Our assembly area is designed mainly for small to medium volume manufacturing.  We maintain equipment for substrate attachment, connector installation, epoxy storage and curing, solder and epoxy screen deposition, hand soldering, automatic pick and place of surface mount components, multi-zone solder reflow, degreasing, semi-automatic pick and place of epoxy-mount components, plasma cleaning, gold wire and ribbon bonding and bond pulling.   When larger volumes are required, we first manufacture in our own facility for design and process verification and then transfer our processes to a contract manufacturer (CM).  We have relationships with a number of CMs with millimeter wave experience, including two off-shore companies with significant experience in building for the point-to-point radio market.  All work destined for the U.S. military is kept either in-house or in-country.

We have basic machining capabilities in-house for quick fabrication of simple parts or rework of externally procured items.  Central to this capability is a Bridgeport milling machine with digital readout.

Our Quality Assurance department maintains a wide range of measurement equipment for incoming, in-process and final inspection. In addition to basic high power microscopes, depth gauges and various types of dimensional standards, we employ Vision Engineering optical and video systems to examine and document small circuit and component features for inspection and failure analysis purposes.

All manufacturing areas of HXI are set up with ESD mats and ionizers.  All manufacturing personnel are aware of the potential damage that can be caused by ESD, especially to the low barrier semiconductors and GaAs MMICs that are used in our products.