Communications

A partnership between Austria-based semiconductor company ams and US start-up Mobeam is designed to make it possible for barcodes to be scanned from a mobile phone screen. The companies claim they have technology which will enable laser scanners in store to scan 1D bar codes displayed on a mobile phone screen for commerce applications that use barcodes such as coupon ...

ST-Ericsson’s Thor M7450 LTE-Advanced modem, currently being sampled, uses a single radio for carrier aggregation. Called M7450, it supports all relevant 3GPP specified frequency bands having 10 flexible RF ports enabling 17 frequency bands or more in the same device. With this modem, ST-Ericsson significantly increases the number of LTE bands compared to devices currently on the market allowing device ...

ISSCC 2013 – 60th Anniversary Held every year in February in San Francisco, the IEEE’s International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) is the world showcase for innovative circuit design. This is the 60th conference, and year’s theme is ’60 years of (em)powering the future’. Latest-generation mobile phone modulation schemes like WCDMA and LTE-Advanced produce very peaky RF signals that need ...

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed a 32Gbit/s data transmitter and receiver with loss equalisation circuits, which it says can be used in the fastest data links between microprocessors. “It is possible to roughly double data communications speed between CPUs,” said Fujitsu Laboratories. Details of the new technologies were presented at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference 2013 in San Francisco. The amount of data traffic exchanged ...

Nujira has been demonstrating how its envelope-tracking (ET) technology could make it practical to use CMOS power amplifiers (PAs) in the RF circuits of 4G smartphones. According to Jeremy Hendy, v-p sales and marketing at Nujira, traditionally CMOS PAs suffer from low inherent linearity. This means they could be used for lower spec 2G and 3G devices with lower transmit power, ...

HomePlug Green PHY has been implemented in a chip for over-mains control of LED lighting, for the first time claims Californian start-up Greenvity. “HomePlug AV is used in set-top boxes in Europe and is starting in the US,” Greenvity CEO Hung Nguyen. “Any lighting system needs to be interoperable with set-top boxes. HomePlug Green PHY co-exists and inter-operates with HomePlug AV.” ...

Neul has announced its first transceiver chip for ‘white space’ communications in 470-790MHz UHF TV bands. Called Iceni, the chip is intended for secure non-line-of-sight machine-to-machine (M2M) communications. Both 6 and 8MHz channel bandwidths are supported, and “adaptive digital modulation schemes and error correction methods can be selected according to the trade-off between data rate and range required for a ...

Broadcom has unveiled its smallest ever 4G LTE-Advanced smartphone wireless modem. The race is on to amongst chip suppliers to take the initiative for the generation of super mobiles which will come after this year’s LTE smartphones. The next generation will be based on the LTE-Advanced standard offering data rates up to 3Gbit/s. Broadcom hopes to challenge the dominance of ...

Cambridge Consultants has developed a sticky radio tag that will detect bad handling of parcels by delivery firms. Called DropTag, the gadget combines a battery, a low-energy Bluetooth transmitter, an accelerometer and a memory chip. Stuck on a parcel as it leaves an e-commerce warehouse, it logs any g-forces above a set risky shock level that it experiences. The idea is ...

Nujira says the first 4G LTE smartphones to use its power efficient RF technology will be on the market next year. “In the past it was an aspiration to get envelope-tracking (ET) technology designed into volume handsets, now we know it will happen in 2014,” Tim Haynes CEO, Nujira told Electronics Weekly. “We have worked with chipset vendors for five ...