Communications

Bell Labs, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent has demonstrated an optical fibre communications technology which it says has the potential to increase today’s 10 to 20 Terabit-per-second fibre capacities to Petabit-per-second capacity – the equivalent of 1,000 Terabits/s. With the comms market moving to 5G wireless technology, Bell Labs estimates that, within about a decade there will be an acute ...

CMOS RF chips continue to make an impact on mobile phone design and a US-based start-up has developed a CMOS power amplifier which will support multi-band 3G/LTE designs, writes mobile reporter Tom Wilson. ACCO Semiconductor says it is in production of a CMOS Multi-mode Multi-band Power Amplifier (MMPA) which supports quad-band GSM/EDGE and 12-band 3G/LTE smartphones. “The AC26120 represents a fundamental ...

David Hawke highlights the role programmable hardware is making in research and development of technologies such as massive MIMO for the 5G mobile communications radio access network. The goals for the so-called radio access network (RAN) for 5G mobile are lofty indeed and have been discussed at length by industry experts. What has received far less airtime is, “What exactly ...

The strength of current UK-based technology start-ups was evident at the Discovering Start-Ups 2015 competition when the winners were announced in London today. The winners ranged from smart glasses for the blind and an online platform for gene testing to an industrial wireless sensor network, real-time risk assessment system for cyber-attacks and a new reversible software debugger. The judges included ...

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced the general availability of its Bluetooth Developer Studio. This a free development environment for developers get to grips with Bluetooth technology, aiming to cut developer learning time for Bluetooth technology and speed product development. It makes building for the IoT simple for developers, from the novice to the experienced, boasts the SIG, ...

5G mobile may be five years away from the commercial market but technology being developed for the next generation mobile networks is to be used to improve today’s 4G mobile communications. Technology for managing the densely packed network infrastructure needed for 5G can also improve data download speeds in 4G networks. Ericsson is running a trail of a network signalling ...

When first proposed, a “thing” on the newly named internet of things (IoT) was imagined as something that could be counted and these existed in relatively simple applications, now IoT is expanding into machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and applications such as manufacturing and power utilities, writes Martha Zemede of Keysight Technologies. While automation is already important in manufacturing, IoT and the ...

IC designers have long understood the value of SPICE simulation for mixed signal and analogue analysis, but it is also being used to analyse digital circuits and could be a critical element of IoT node design, writes Gerhard Angst Design complexity can be addressed in a number of ways; often it is to break a task down into smaller, more ...

Joining the dots – the backhaul challenge behind next-generation mobile networks, writes Steve Greaves, CEO of CCS. Faced with unprecedented levels of network congestion in the not-too-distant future, mobile operators will be looking at ways of improving spectral efficiency through the deployment of multi-layered radio access networks. These new-look networks are comprised of macrocells to deliver wide-area coverage and small ...

The Weightless SIG has launched a Weightless-N development environment for low power wide area network connectivity in IoT projects. The development kits include a desktop base station with the same functionality as a commercial grade base station packaged in a non-ruggedised casing, a base station antenna, an end product module mounted on a development carrier board with external connections, a ...