Posted on 03/06/2015 10:01:24 AM PST by Utilizer
Cambridge Consultants demonstrates a world first in radio design
Technology innovation firm Cambridge Consultants has successfully completed initial trials of the world’s first fully digital radio transmitter – a turning point in wireless design and a real enabler for the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) and 5G technology. It’s a radio built purely from computing power, using the same familiar digital technology you’d find in a computer microprocessor in your home or office.
Unlike ‘software-defined radio’ (SDR), it’s not a mixture of analogue and digital components – for the first time, the radio is completely digital, which can enable new ways of using spectrum intelligently. The innovation is set to be hugely disruptive, like a previous Cambridge Consultants breakthrough – the development of the first single-chip Bluetooth radio, which led to the spinout of the global short-range wireless and audiovisual giant CSR.
The latest breakthrough – codenamed Pizzicato – unlocks the potential of the IoT. It opens the door to a new dynamic way in which the predicted 100 billion IoT devices can operate together in a crowded radio spectrum. And it will enable the creation of 5G systems, with multiple radios and antennas.
The Pizzicato digital radio transmitter consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna – with no conventional radio parts or digital-to-analogue converter. Patented algorithms perform the necessary ultra-fast computations in real time, making it possible for standard digital technology to generate high-frequency radio signals directly.
(Excerpt) Read more at cambridgeconsultants.com ...
More information in the article about what has been achieved so far, but not sure how the average tinkerer could go about implementing something like this so feel free to comment.
Put in one app, it turns into a radar that can drive your car.
Put in another app, and it will cook your lunch with RF.
Put in another app, and it becomes a cell phone.
Put in another app, and it will fly your drone.
You're forgetting Moore's Law. This thing is entirely digital.
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I have no idea what “all digital” would be unless it’s spitting out individual photons or electrons.
Actually, I was referring to the cost of using a microprocessor and associated ICs to produce an RF output, especially at any useable power levels.
Think of it as attempting to generate, transmit, and receive RF signals using a motherboard and perhaps some logic chips.
Much cheaper to use analog components and simple circuits or simply purchase a prebuilt unit and customize it for your needs.
Current SDR technology requires such a minimal amount of analog that this would seem to more of an innovation in mixing than any huge breakthrough. Will be implemented in silicon, not by hobbyists.
A single IC in this case, actually a single microprocessor generating an RF signal or several. However I am not certain what power levels they would be capable of as the article does not discuss real-world usage examples.
It is one thing to generate defined frequencies for RF usage, but realistically you have to amplify them as well to be able to send and receive them for specific distances.
So what does this mean, wireless internet for the world?
Moore’s law is strictly microprocesser density and I was thinking of economic scaling, so that wasn’t really an appropriate example on my part. What I meant, though, is that if purely digital radio becomes advantageous commercially, then the cost of making it will dramatically fall. Even though cheap digital components can be used now, they’re still more expensive than analog, as you pointed out. But in time? We’re talking billions of applications here, which would definitely result in a lot of specific hardware creations to support it - LSICs, etc. - which could be churned out extremely cheaply if there is a need.
Sounds like a spread spectrum radio
This looks to me like a reporter who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Digital devices run on extremely low power. To transmit a radio signal to a receiver over some considerable distance requires much more power. There’s simply no way to get around that. There’s something missing from this report that describes how to deal with the physics of radio transmission.
So what does this mean, wireless internet for the world?Now that you mention it, wasn't there tech-wonks saying something or another about -- that after we were all forced to switch to set top boxes for digital TV, that would free up all those analog TV broadcast freqs for things such as, "city wide WiFi"?
FYI
And the beat goes on. This kinda ties in with what we were talking about.
Pretty much the point I was attempting to make, among others. Besides adequate transmit power for the frequencies generated you also need things such as bandpass filters, noise reduction circuits, and modulation controllers to name just a few things necessary for a proper “radio” to function.
Generating frequencies, even several at the same time is but one aspect of how radios work.
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