July 2008 Startup Proposes Wi-Fi For Personal Area Networks Materials suppliers are constantly refining their recipes in search of products that offer greater value and increased reliability for a variety of commercial, industrial, and military applications Jack Browne Technical Director Microwave materials represent building blocks for high-frequency circuits and systems. Whether they are used to hold circuit traces, absorb or suppress radiofrequency interference (RFI), or form resonant... — Jack Browne July 2008 Examine The Effects Of Phase Noise On RFID Range Radio-frequency-identification (RFID) systems have become widespread as reliable means of storing and remotely retrieving data through the use of compact RFID tags. In particular, the use of ultrahigh- frequency (UHF) passive RFID is appealing for many applications since it enables recognition from a reasonable distance. The technology is ideal for supply-chain management and several major firms, such as Wal-Mart and Tesco, are planning to mandate... — Dr. Byung-Jun Jang , et al. July 2008 Design An X-Band Vivaldi Antenna Antennas are essential to highfrequency communications and electronic systems for radiating or receiving electromagnetic (EM) energy. Although there are many types of antennas, they all operate according to the same basic EM principles. The basic behavior of an antenna can be described by its wave field strength, polarization, and direction of propagation.1 Key requirements in applications such as airborne radar and communications systems... — Dr. J.S. Mandeep , et al. July 2008 SiGe GPS Receiver Handles Two Antennas Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are being embedded into almost any bit of electronic gear that moves, from the electronic circuits in automobiles to cellular telephones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). To support this “global” expansion, SiGe Semiconductor has developed its model SE4150L GPS radio receiver for next-generation embedded GPS applications. The tiny receiver targets the three main requirements of these emerging... — Jack Browne June 16, 2008 LTE Spectrum Bands Make Their Way Into Commercial Apps In deploying its initial products for the recently auctioned Long-Term Evolution (LTE) spectrum bands, Motorola Inc. will include products for the 700-MHz and 2.6-GHz spectrum bands to help operators increase coverage and capacity of their networks as they strive to meet the growing demand for mobile broadband services — Lisa Maliniak June 16, 2008 Reflective Electro-Absorption Modulator Fills High-Bandwidth Architecture Gap In releasing what it terms the first commercial reflective electro-absorption modulator (R-EAM), CIP Technologies (CIP) hopes to provide developers of access network and other communications applications with the means to implement new system architectures — Lisa Maliniak June 2008 Disparate Solutions Work To Fill Communications Gap More than seven years have passed since the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Since that time, the world has witnessed the subway bombings in the UK, the train bombings in Spain, and multiple other attacks. Government agencies have boosted their resources to gather more intelligence and prevent such attacks. In addition, they continue to emphasize the need for interoperable communications. Problems with communications continue to arise during... — Nancy Friedrich June 2008 Multibeam Antenna Serves Broadband Wireless Coms Multibeam antennas can provide increased wireless communications capacity with enhanced spectral efficiency and higher quality of service. One approach to designing such an antenna involves the use of space division multiple access (SDMA) techniques. SDMA methods provide high user capacity in a limited frequency spectrum without any major technological changes.1 SDMA techniques, which are implemented by most wireless service... — Jasmin Desai , et al. June 2008 Planar Resonators Arm Tunable Oscillators Communication systems rely on low-phase-noise signal sources such as tunable oscillators or phase-lock-loop (PLL) synthesizers for reliable voice communications and to ensure transmitted data integrity. Challenges still remain in achieving reasonable trade offs in low phase noise, low thermal drift, low power consumption, low cost, and potential for integration in integrated-circuit (IC) processes, however.1-38 With ever- increasing demands... — Ajay Kumar Poddar , et al. June 2008 Is Bluetooth And NFC A Marriage Made In Heaven? WELLINGBOROUGH, UK—For some time, the combination of Bluetooth technology and Near Field Communication (NFC) has been seen as the perfect match of short-range wireless technologies. Despite the talk, though, these technologies are by no means ready to drive off together into a golden sunset. Still, the view of the two technologies as complementary is well founded. According to IMS Research, Bluetooth already is well established in the market: More than half of the cellular... — Dawn Hightower May 30, 2008 Spirent Communications and Agilent Technologies Will Join EGPS Forum Agilent Technologies and Spirent Communications will join CSR and Motorola in the EGPS Forum, an open industry forum for evaluating and fostering enhanced Global Positioning System (EGPS) technologies. Working with CSR, each company has created a building block of a system that can simulate both GPS and cellular signals... — Lisa Maliniak May 2008 High-Dynamic-Range Mixer Upconverts 1.5 To 3.8 GHz Active frequency mixers provide the frequency-translation function required in modern communications systems, with the added benefit of conversion gain in contrast to the conversion loss of passive mixers. Model LT5579 from Linear Technology (www.linear.com) is such an active mixer, designed for upconversion applications from 1.5 to 3.8 GHz. It offers enough bandwidth to cover the 1.9-GHz cellular... — Jack Browne May 2008 Electrically Tune A Planar Inverted-F Antenna WITH THE PLETHORA of wireless standards being applied to today’s handheld devices, the antennas integrated in those products must often operate in 10 or more frequency bands. For the antenna designer, this translates into the challenge of having to cover a single very wide frequency band or multiple frequency bands while maintaining small size and high efficiency. A novel solution may be to use antennas that have a reconfigurable operating frequency with... — Nancy Friedrich May 2008 Mobile WiMAX Multi-Antenna Techniques Offer Carriers New Option FOR WIRELESS OPERATORS, the introduction of bandwidth- intensive, rich media applications means that more subscribers will begin to consume increasing amounts of data packets. To conquer the resulting capacity issues, operators can acquire more spectrum channels and deploy more sites. Yet these approaches are both inefficient and costly. In “A Practical Guide to WiMAX Antennas: MIMO and Beamforming Technical Overview,” Motorola asserts that mobile WiMAX—in... — Nancy Friedrich May 2008 American Radio Relay League Petitions Federal Communications Commission The American Radio Relay League, Inc., has petitioned on behalf of licensed amateur radio operators for the review of two orders of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) promulgating a rule to regulate the use of the radio spectrum by Access Broadband over Power Line (Access BPL) operators. The FCC concluded that existing safeguards combined with new protective measures required by the rule will prevent harmful interference to licensees from Access BPL radio... — Dawn Hightower May 2008 2.5-GHz, 90-Deg. Antenna Serves WiMAX Base Stations TO TARGET both fixed and mobile WiMAX applications, a new antenna is promising to provide a very predictable pattern and consistent performance. The antenna specifically targets maximal-ratio-combining (MRC), multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO), and other wireless wide-areanetwork applications. The 2.5-GHz, dual-slant 45-deg., 90-deg. WiMAX base-station antenna is fully compliant with ETSI EN 301.525 CS pattern specifications. It operates across the 2.3-to-2.7-GHz... — Nancy Friedrich May 6, 2008 Clocking Family Trims Noise In Wireless Infrastructure A family of three ultra-low-noise clock buffers, dividers, and distributors vows to simplify system clock design while providing additive noise of just 30 fs of additive root-mean-square (RMS) jitter... — Paul Whytock May 6, 2008 2.4-GHz Transceiver Delivers Lean Power Solution A single-chip, 2.4-GHz transceiver is promising to deliver impressive radio performance. The nRF24L01+ from Nordic Semiconductor (www.nordicsemi.com) delivers a 250-kb/s data-rate option mode that triples operating range and drop-in compatibility with the company’s existing nRF24L01 2.4-GHz Ultra Low Power (ULP) transceiver... — Paul Whytock May 6, 2008 Renesas Teams Up With IMEC On Reconfigurable RF Transceivers Renesas Technology has entered into research collaboration with IMEC, Europe's independent nanoelectronics research centre. The joint venture will concentrate on developing 45nm RF transceivers targeted at Gbit/s cognitive radios... — Paul Whytock April 2008 Rugged Cables And Connectors Can Take Abuse Microwave and optical cables and connectors currently serve a variety of industries. Yet they always have the common objective of delivering a transmission path for both highspeed digital and high-frequency analog signals. Their diverse capabilities and performance are derived from their design as well as other factors, such as materials. As it does in every industry, design follows demand. In other words, the evolution of such factors is driven... — Nancy Friedrich |
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