Communications

RedRat of Saffron Walden makes test equipment in the UK and exports 96% of its output – predominantly to America, South East Asia and India. The BBC, Sky, DirecTV, Comcast and Samsung are amongst the 300 customers it has supplied in over 40 countries – for testing set-top boxes, smart-TVs and broadcast equipment, amongst other things. Its main product is irNetBox, a programmable ...

SDRplay of Wakefield, the 18-month-old software defined radio specialist, is now shipping its $149 software defined radio (SDR) receiver in quantities of 1,000 a month, Inspired by the SDR capabilities that even a simple 8-bit TV dongle can perform, SDRplay had the idea of partnering with Mirics to take their 12-bit wideband broadcast chipset and to re-purpose it for the hobbyist ...

Qualcomm and TDK are setting up  a 51/49 JV to be known as RF360 Holdings. The JV will pair TDK’s RF filter/module expertise with Qualcomm’s RF front-end solutions, and will create filters and front-end modules for mobile devices, IoT hardware, drones, robots, and other end-markets. Qualcomm will invest $1.2 billion and has the option to buy TDK’s interest in the ...

Cobham Wireless, the UK-based wireless infrastructure supplier, has announced the deployment of its smart distributed antenna system (DAS) by operators Vodafone and Telefónica for their 4G LTE network in Berlin’s Fan Mile, writes mobile correspondent, Tom Wilson. The deployment was timed for the German capital’s New Year’s Eve event, with over one million visitors attending a party on the Fan Mile. This ...

CERN, Europe’s nuclear research facility, has worked with US-based interface IC firm Integrated Device Technology to create a data bus platform with the necessarily low latency needed for data analytics at the organisation’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and data centre. CERN recognised it needed to improve overall data acquisition and analysis for the massive volumes of data collected by the experiments ...

The latest version of the ZigBee low power radio standard will include for the first time support for energy harvesting as defined by the EnOcean Alliance. ZigBee 3.0 will be an open specification that is intended to support energy harvesting wireless communications operating in the 2.4GHz for the first time. “We are very excited that the EnOcean Alliance is bringing its ...

How to optimise digital modulation accuracy in an IQ modulator? Bruce Hemp and Peter Stroet from Linear Technology describe how a vector signal analyser helps optimise EVM performance of the LTC5598 direct quadrature modulator. EVM, or error vector magnitude, is essentially a scalar measurement of digital modulation accuracy, an important figure of merit for any source of digital modulation. Low ...

Apple is thought to be developing its own super low power display technology for iPhones. This is the latest example of Apple looking to take ownership of the core semiconductor technologies in its mobile phones. It has been designing its own processors and system-on-chip devices for at least two generations of the iPhone. A report on Bloomberg, says Apple’s low ...

The spectrum and channel bandwidth requirements of 5G mobile communications is raising test challenges. For example, 5G mobile radio will use microwave and millimeter‑wave frequencies and it will have larger channel bandwidth. According to Rohde & Schwarz, one of the test requirements of 5G will be channel sounding. “5G developers need to know the exact transmission path characteristics in order to measure ...

The EU Directive 2013/35/EU on the minimum health and safety requirements regarding the exposure of workers to the risks arising from physical agents (the electromagnetic field)  published in mid-2013 is due to be transposed into UK law by July of next year, 2016. Howard Venning, managing director of Aspen Electronics, lifts the lid on the subject and offers help to reach ...