RF & Microwave

The row between a Swiss-led consortium and a German-led consortium about the right approach for a European contact tracing app has been resolved with Germany falling in with the Swiss model. The row was over where information generated by the app should be stored.  Germany’s PEPP-PT system stored it centrally, Switzerland’s DPT-3 system stored it on the mobile device. The ...

The use of Bluetooth in contact tracing has been widely supported on the Continent but there is disagreement there on how to implement it. A German approach called  Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT https://www.pepp-pt.org) conflicts with a Swiss approach, called DP-3T,  which links into the Google-Apple contact tracing app. PEPP-PT is seen as centralised – storing informstion on government computers ...

Samsung is to use Xilinx’s Versal ACAP (adaptive compute acceleration platform) for  worldwide 5G commercial deployments. Versal ACAP performs the real-time signal processing, including beamforming techniques used to increase network capacity. 5G requires beamforming, which allows multiple data streams to be transmitted simultaneously to multiple users using the same spectrum. This is what enables the  increase in 5G network capacity.  Beamforming ...

Apple and Google to use Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of Covid-19, via contact tracing.

U-Blox has completed AT&T’s chipset verification process for the UBX-R5 multi-band low power wide area (LPWA) chipset platform to operate on the carrier’s LTE-M network for the Internet of Things. The chipset features end-to-end device security, data security, and access control management. The cellular chipset platform, supporting LPWA LTE-M and NB-IoT technologies, is designed for long life cycle IoT applications ...

Renesas Electronics has announced that its RL78/G1H-based sub-gigahertz (sub-GHz) wireless solution has received certification under the wireless smart ubiquitous network for field area network profile (Wi-Sun Fan), one of the communication standards established by the Wi-Sun Alliance. It comprises Tessera Technology Inc.’s TK-RLG1H+SB2 evaluation board, which incorporates the Renesas 16-bit RL78/G1H MCU with integrated wireless functionality, and a Wi-Sun Fan ...

Renesas has introduced a mmWave synthesiser for 5G and broadband wireless applications. “We developed our 8V97003 for mmWave radios, ensuring it meets demanding frequency range, phase noise, and output power requirements,” said Renesas v-p of timing products Bobby Matinpour. “8V97003 is particularly well-suited for emerging applications above the 6GHz carrier frequency, including broadband wireless, microwave back-haul, and 5G radios.” The ...

With the design of secured IoT products in mind, Microchip has announced range of cloud agnostic embedded development products that connect through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or narrow-band 5G. “From the smallest PIC and AVR MCUs for sensors and actuators, to 32bit MCU and MPU gateways for edge computing, the company is making it possible for developers to connect to any major ...

Macom has introduced transimpedance amplifiers for optical comms ranging from 100Gbit/s DR1 to 800Gbit/s DR8 and FR8. There are two parts, which come in flip chip and wire bonding packaging options for deployment in QSFP, QSFP-DD and OSFP optical modules. MATA-05817 has noise typically below 2μArms and supports bandwidth up to 35GHz. It is aimed at high density optical data ...

Fractus Antennas is aiming at wearables with a evaluation board for its 7 x 3 x 2mm ‘Duo mXtend’ ‘antenna booster’. Antenna booster? “This technology enables replacing conventional and custom antenna solutions by a new class of so-called antenna boosters, delivered in the form of miniature off-the-shelf chip antenna components,” according to the firm. This one “has been specifically designed ...