RF & Microwave

The Zigbee Alliance – which oversees Zigbee, the IoT-friendly wireless standard – has announced a development within the Connected Home over IP project (CHIP). Featuring the likes of Amazon, Google and Apple, the project has the aim of establishing a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home products. Now, it is forming a team dedicated to the development ...

Apple, Google and LG have joined the Next G Alliance, a coalition of companies founded in October by The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) with the aim to establish North America as a leader in 6G. Members include: Ericsson, Nokia, Charter Communications; Cisco; Hewlett Packard Enterprise; Intel; Keysight Technologies; Mavenir; MITRE; and VMware. Huawei is not a member. Companies banned from ...

Ampleon has announced a 250W RF power transistor for solid-state cooking and ISM (industrial, scientific and medical) applications in the 2.4 to 2.5GHz frequency band. Called BLP2425M10S250P, it is made on the company’s tenth-generation LDMOS process and operates with 67% drain efficiency. Described as “cost-optimised” by Ampleon, it swaps the traditional ceramic package for plastic to better compete with traditional 2.45GHz ...

Xilinx has announced an enhanced Zynq RFSoC architecture to meet the requirements of a second wave of 5G. The ZynqRFSoC DFE integrates hardened digital front end application-specific blocks for 5G NR performance. It will operate up to 7.125GHz and is futureproofed for 3GPP and O-RAN radio architectures, says Gilles Garcia, director of Wired Communication, at Xilinx.  Release 17 of 3GPP ...

Qualcomm is to make modules for 5G telecoms infrastructure ranging from macro base stations with massive MIMO to micro base stations with compact designs, to accelerate the cellular ecosystem transition toward virtualized and interoperable radio access networks (RAN).  Qualcomm is introducing three 5G RAN platform offerings: Qualcomm Radio Unit Platform, Qualcomm Distributed Unit Platform, and Qualcomm Distributed Radio Unit Platform. ...

Nokia has revealed further details of being chosen by NASA last week as a partner involved in the Artemis operation, specifically to deploy a cellular network on the lunar surface. Nokia has proposed to deploy the first LTE/4G communications system in space, and on the lunar surface by “late 2022”. The idea is that it could support lunar surface communications ...

NXP is sampling its family of 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 (802.11ax) Dual Band + Bluetooth/BLE chips for advanced gaming, audio, industrial and IoT markets. NXP’s IW62X family will provide increased capacity, efficiency and performance for smart consumer IoT hubs, wireless speakers, video-enabled smart devices, augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) devices and IoT applications. The devices are suitable for advanced gaming consoles ...

STMicroelectronics has introduced a third generation of Bluetooth chip, describing it as “the world’s first Bluetooth LE 5.2-certified SoC to support concurrent connections up to 128 nodes”. Called BlueNRG-LP, according o the company it can consume as little as 3.4mA in receive mode, 4.3mA when transmitting, and under 500nA when quietly waiting for wake-up events. RF output power is programmable ...

The Zigbee Alliance – which oversees Zigbee, the IoT-friendly wireless standard – has launched a Europe Interest Group, made up of volunteer members with a shared focus on Zigbee in the European market. Areas of interest include the Connected Home over IP project (CHIP). This has the aim of establishing a royalty-free connectivity standard to increase compatibility among smart home ...

GNSS antenna modules by Reyax are claimed to have smallest dimensions available today. The company’s GPS, Glonass, Galileo and BeiDo modules are now available from Manhattan Skyline. The RYS8830 is a small form factor, low power 1.8V UART/I2C interface GNSS antenna module, built on the high performance Sony CXD5605GF CXD5605AGF GNSS engine. It uses concurrent reception of GNSS systems for ...