Communications

David Bell from Linear Technology says an Asic strategy “poses inherent risks”, whereas an ASSP offers most of the functionality with less risk Handheld electronic products such as cellular phones, digital cameras and MP3 players are driving growth in the worldwide electronics industry. These battery-powered devices are undergoing rapid evolution, driven by competitive pressures and gadget-crazy customers demanding the latest ...

Freescale Semiconductor has demonstrated a direct-sequence ultra wideband (DS-UWB) chipset operating at more than 110Mbit/s over 20m. The firm said the extended range is a direct result of a regulatory waiver granted in March by the FCC. The XS110 device is packaged in a mini-PCI card and used inside a media gateway from Taiwanese original design manufacturer USI. Martin Rofheart, ...

The University of Strathclyde is looking into air interfaces and network management strategies for 4G mobile phone systems. “We have already studied diversity – spatial, frequency, code and time – and have done some work on coding – variable-spread coding,” principle investigator Professor Ivan Andonovic told Electronics Weekly. “We will translate this into a meaningful implementation – a practical chip,” ...

Intel has revealed it is using physical layer technology from Bath-based wireless processing specialist PicoChip Designs in its WiMAX demonstration board. Apart from a few named customers, notably Airspan, PicoChip has been unable to name a number of its partners. Strictly speaking it is still under a non-disclosure agreement with Intel. “Lots and lots of people are using us, some ...

Frontier Silicon, the fabless mobile digital TV and DAB chip maker, has begun sampling a terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) chipset in South Korea. “This is our next step,” said Steve Evans, v-p of sales at Frontier Silicon. “T-DMB is fundamentally based on DAB. We’ve added some software to the baseband and some hardware [a Reed Solomon decoder] to reduce ...

Since the Chinese government declared in March that it was considering a formal adoption of Bluetooth-enabled technology, the consensus has been building that it will have a positive effect on OEMs and design houses nationwide. According to Michael Foley, executive director of the Bluetooth SIG (Special Interest Group), Asia generates 50 to 80 per cent of Bluetooth-related products and technologies. ...

NASA and Georgia Tech are looking to replace large expensive ground link dishes with arrays of cheap antennas backed by signal processing. Information from satellites, such as Earth Observing-1 (EO-1), is now down-linked to various 11m dishes which each cost around $4m and need a resident crew. A satellite contacts the dishes five to eight times a day for ten ...

Set-top boxes supporting the MPEG-4 AVC standard have been announced by UK companies Amino Communications and Pace Micro Technology. MPEG-4 AVC, or H.264, is a high compression digital video codec standard which Amino said is in “high demand” in the market-place. “Within IPTV (Internet protocol TV), MPEG-4 is the most demanded technology in industry,” said Karthik Ranjan, v-p of product ...

TTPCom claims to be able to cut the development time for a 3G handset to just four months with its Ajar 3G design platform. This version of the Cambridge-based firm’s Ajar software design platform tailored for 3G handsets has a mix of proprietary and third party applications software supported by over thirty pre-integrated applications and over twenty from leading third ...

Sales of wireless LAN equipment climbed 20 per cent from the last quarter of 2004 to the first three months of this year. This was despite “plummeting ASPs from fierce vendor competition”, according to a report from market analyst Infonetics Research. In the recent quarter, 12.2 million WLAN products were shipped, worth $768m. However, the market is expected to flatten, ...