Communications

Availability of 5G networks is expected to climb quickly throughout 2020 and beyond. 5G networks already operate in cities across the globe including London, New York and Seoul, and although availability is low right now, adoption is expected to climb quickly throughout 2020 and beyond. The parameters for what would come to constitute a 5G network were defined in 2015 ...

Rutronik UK adds the Telit LM960A18 Mini PCIe (mPCIe) data card. It uses Advanced LTE to deliver high-speed data rates for network appliances, such as routers, mobile gateways and access points. The card is based on LTE Category 18 and achieves up to 1.2Gbps download and 150Mbps upload. It supports uplinke with 2x carrier aggregation (CA), downlink with up to ...

Swarms of drones with limited resources can effectively search an environment, according to the Technical University of Delft, which has invented an algorithm to make it all work – without guidance from a central computer. The overall aim of the project was for a group of small robots to spread out autonomously after they are released, video as much of an ...

Test gear maker National Instruments systems has announced a 110-170GHz software-defined radio for 6G comms research, built on NI’s existing mmWave Transceiver System (MTS) and Virginia Diodes’ (VDI) radio heads. MTS has modular base-band and IF components that can be combined with programmable logic (FPGAs) to build complex RF transceiver – such as MIMO systems with digital signal processing capabilities. ...

The Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has developed and demonstrated the first large-scale optical switching test bed capable of handling one petabit per second optical signals – that is 1015bit/s and “equivalent to the capacity to send 8K video to 10 million people simultaneously”, according to the lab. Low-loss MEMS optical switches were used, alongside three ...

Chirp and DSP Group have announced the Chirp SDK reference design for sound-based data transmission. The design kit combines Chirp’s ultrasonic signaling protocol for smart-enabled devices with DSP Group’s Smartvoice technology to allow connectivity between nearby devices without set up, pairing, or configuration. Chirp’s ultrasonic machine-to-machine communications software enables any device with a loudspeaker or microphone to exchange data using ...

Adesto Technologies Corporation and Cadence Design Systems have announced a collaboration to expand the ecosystem around the expanded serial peripheral interface (xSPI) communication protocol to enable higher transfer rates and lower latency for flash memory in IoT devices. The Cadence memory model for xSPI enables use of the octal NOR flash with the host processor in an xSPI system, including ...

Microchip is offering high security IoT authentication to companies with no prior security knowledge, that are producing as few as 10 units. Authentication, in this case, is proving the identity of a device attempting to connect across a network using asymmetric cryptography. Called ‘Trust Platform’, this is a ‘pre-provisioned’ hardware-based secure key storage system, which also offers solutions for mid and ...

Bacteria can grow optically-active tellurium nano-rods, according to the University of Houston. Optoelectronic and photonic devices could benefit. The current discovery grew out of 30 years of basic research, stemming from an initial discovery of selenite-respiring bacteria that form discrete packets of elemental selenium. “From there, it was a step down the periodic table to learn that the same could ...

Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used atoms to decode digital signals encoded by phase modulation. The atoms, cesium in this case, are ‘Rydberg atoms’ – atoms that have been wound up into a high energy state that is extremely sensitive to electric and magnetic fields. In this case the atoms were in a vapour cell, pushed ...