Communications

Browsing among the crowded booths and enthusiastic attendees of Mobile World Congress this week, the world’s biggest showcase of mobile phone technologies, the overwhelming presence of one particular product is blatantly obvious – Virtual Reality (VR), writes Tom Wilson from Barcelona. The floors of the MWC exhibition tend to provide a good indication of the years key consumer products. Mobile World Congress: Your Electronics ...

Rohde & Schwarz demonstrated at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona an RF test set-up for LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation with four component carriers in the downlink. Two CMW500 testers each generated two component carriers with 2×2 MIMO using the 256QAM modulation method. The complete set-up can achieve a high data throughput of up to 800Mbit/s in the downlink, said Rohde & ...

Panasonic was at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week to talk about its connected vehicle collaboration with automotive safety systems supplier Ficosa. The companies have developed an in-car communications module which supports multiple users and applications simultaneously through the vehicle’s wireless connection. As well as providing an internet connection, the module sets up a secure connection for communications inside ...

In the search for more mobile data bandwidth Google, Intel, Nokia and Qualcomm are part of a group of companies which proposing to use the US 3.5GHz Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) for new types of mobile services. Last year the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) opened 150MHz of spectrum in the 3.5GHz CBRS band for commercial use. The spectrum ...

LG has confirmed its latest flagship smartphone, the G5, at a special event before the official opening of Mobile World Conference in Barcelona this week, writes Tom Wilson. Among the usual announcements of faster processors and better camera technology, LG had an ace up its sleeve to differentiate itself from the competition by debuting the world’s first commercially available modular smartphone. Unlike ...

Keysight Technologies will demonstrate its E7515A UXM wireless test set at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The demonstration will feature LTE-A Pro end-to-end IP data throughput of 1Gbit/s using three component carriers, 4×4 and 2×2 downlink MIMO, and 256 QAM downlink modulation. Also on display is the UXM’s first-to-market benchtop support for five component carrier (5CC) data throughput and 1.6Gbps data rates ...

LG Electronics has licensed the Ceva imaging and vision digital signal processor (DSP) silicon intellectual property (IP) for integration into mobile processor SoCs. The DSPs carry out the image processing needed in computational photography and computer vision applications such as video analytics, augmented reality and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). The dedicated DSPs take off-loaded tasks from the CPUs and GPUs, ...

Antenova has revealed an antenna for TransferJet, and is demonstrating it at Embedded World in Nuremberg. TransferJet is a wireless technology for high-speed (375Mbit/s) transfer of large files, secured by proximity – think fast NFC. It operates in the unlicensed bands in places including the USA, Europe and Japan. Antenova’s device is a surface-mount coupler called Zoma that operates in the ...

Sequans Communications has partnered with Skyworks Solutions to design an integrated IoT device for LTE Category M (Cat M) applications. The device leverages Skyworks’ half-duplex RF front-end module and Sequans’ Monarch LTE Cat M single chip to support designs  based on Release 13 of the 3GPP LTE standard. It also offers low data rate, low power connections for IoT devices, and ...

After choosing to exclusively adopt the use of its own Exynos 7 octa-core processor in last year’s Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge models, Samsung has once again turned to Qualcomm Technologies to power the new Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge, writes Tom Wilson from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Qualcomm has confirmed that the Snapdragon 820 processor will be present ...