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Antenna Breakthrough Called E-tenna
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now. The widely respected EETimes has a story about a company called e-tenna that is using microelectromechanical technology to bring the "elusive goal of a software-defined radio one step closer to reality". This is the type of thing that deserves a patent!" The idea here is to have a radio device capable of transmitting/receiving over a wide range of wavelengths without any moving parts, and instead of a set of inductors and capacitors for tuning, it does most of the "work" in a general-purpose chip.
I used to be a car audio engineer, working mostly on Blaupunkt. In 1998 they brought a range of high-end radios based on the "Digiceiver" chipset, which basically operates on the RF at a digital level (ie software based tuning and decoding). The Blaupunkt website has full details of this system, up to a pretty good tech level.
Basically it operates on a 2 chip basis (both made by motorola to BP specs), the first running the PLL tuning, band selection and stereo decoding, and the second chip altering the sound dynamics (DSP), volume and so on. The theory is that the signal is kept in a digital state much longer and from earlier than in conventional "analogue" tuning systems.
From what I can see this is very similar.
Ben^3 (defending the Germans for once)
If you don't know anything about electronics go moderate some other story. "Out of the 'loop'" is an inductor pun.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Do that *before* they blaze the trail, i.e., have the idea in the first place, prove that it's possible, develop the tools necessary, etc., and then we'll be impressed and you will be entitled to benefit from your work without having to share the take. Otherwise negotiate a contract with them that lets them profit from having made your improvement on their work possible in the first place.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
When they talk about direct conversion, do they mean going straight from modulated carrier to baseband, eliminating the I.F. strip, like the old TRF radios?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I don't quite see how 'GSM won the standards war in the US' - check www.gsmworld.com for the stats, and it's clear that the number of GSM subscribers in the US is tiny. AT&T Wireless are converting from TDMA to GSM/GPRS, and then W-CDMA, but Sprint, Cingular and others are resolutely CDMA2000, largely because that lets them re-use existing spectrum whereas W-CDMA demands new spectrum.
EDGE is as you say, the key point is that it lets you upgrade to higher speeds within existing spectrum, without a complete overhaul of the radio access network, but it's going to be quite wide-spread. CDMA2000 and W-CDMA will take a long time to roll out to high coverage (some say 2006 or 2007), and EDGE or even GPRS will be used as fill-in for all the rural areas where new, smaller cells can't be justified yet.
Applications will need to be highly adaptive to varying bandwidth and error rates, even in the brave new 3G world.
The world really needs software-defined radio to achieve the goal of one phone that works everywhere.
There are already 3 different digital cell phone standards in North America (CDMA, TDMA and GSM), and at least one more in Japan (PDC) - the rest of the world uses GSM, but life is going to get much more complicated with 2.5G and 3G:
- 2.5G (data rates of 40 to 100 Kbps, packet mode)is mainly GSM or CDMA based, but EDGE is a new radio transmission technology
- 3G (data rates up to 384 Kbps when mobile, 2 Mbps in buildings) will use W-CDMA in most of the world, with CDMA2000 picking up much of North America. China has just decreed yet another 3G radio standard, TD-SCDMA.
So, if you want a phone that roams onto all common networks today or in the 2.5/3G world, you'll need a lot of different radio standards supported.
While I can't tell whether this development is truly important, EETimes seems to think it is, and software-defined radio will be very useful. Just think, you could download a new radio module before going to another country, rather than having to rent a phone and tell everyone your temporary phone number (just like GSM today, but that only has 70% market share globally, even though it just hit the half-billion subscriber mark).
The antennas are smaller because the frequencies have gone up, that's it. Your 2 meter antenna is going to be the same as it was in the 1970's. Now wavelengths are just a few centimeters, making the most efficient antenna much smaller.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What's so special about this "technology"?
Ever since the end of days for the black and white tv (~1968), capacitor capacitance and inductor variation has been mechanical. It is still the simplest demonstration of controlling the transmission or reception of varying wavelengths. Please note that this is still in "the books".
I've been working for IC Fabs off and on for the last 4 years. It doesnt take a big company to tell me how to design a "general purpose chip" (as they put it) that will provide me with CONTROLLED resistance and impedence. This is also in "the books". I am surprised that this hasnt been done 100 times already...although chip die is still pretty expensive to throw away on developing for old technology nowadays...Still, this is not special.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Uh yeah, no rheostats, that's it. ;-)
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Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Patent - A temporary monopoly granted to an inventor for one of his inventions. In return, the invention is published, and there's no risk of losing any techniques because the inventor was too secretive. Expires in a relatively short (~20 years) time. After that, the invention is in the public domain and anybody can make one.
Copyright - The right to control copying of a work, such as music, writing, etc. Granted automatically in the US to any such work, although it's still better to formally register it with the copyright office. Takes forever to expire (~100 years).
Trademark - A monopoly on a brand name. Must be applied for. Only applies within an industry; two trademarks on the same name may be held if the products that go with them are unrelated. Expires only when the product is no longer made, or when it's not renewed.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I have no connection with E-Tenna thing or with EETimes. However, I would like to step forward and say that for years I have had more respect for EETimes than any of the numerous trade journal that I receive, bar none.
Just about every other trade journal will take news of a patent as a major technological breakthrough and proof of great technical leadership within a company. EETimes seems to scrutinize the actual technology and give at least some coverage to small companies and graduate student project. They also occasionally cover the arguments of those who identify patent and copyright abuse, attempts to make government works copyrighted, and export restrictions. EETimes does not claim to be a referreed technical journal or even "hard news" like The San Jose Mercury News, but I think it's probably the best trade journal that I have come across. I, for one, respect them as much and usually more than the sources on which Slashdot stories are based.
/. suckered? Well, then so was Ars Technica - yesterday.
I find myself going there more and more every day. It's a real shame.
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
Unless the researchers have succeeded in developing a completely new form of radio frequency radiation in addition to their basic claim (a new type of antenna), the output from any of their "antennas" will be exactly as harmful or benign as the RF from any conventional wire antenna.
Multiple little technological slips like this in the article cause me to wonder if this isn't a delayed printing of a press release dated April First.
Years of reading the April annual reports from Larson E. Rapp in QST have helped me develop a highly sensitive Bullshit Filter (BF). And, after reading this article, the meter on my BF is pegged full-scale.
Ancient saying states that any sufficiently advanced science is indestinguishable from black magic.
Corollary of ancient saying states that any sufficiently buzz-worded press release is indestinguishable from newspaper representation of scientatific fact.
Since when is EE Times widely respected? This is not a peer-reviewed journal, nor a source of significant independent research. It's a typical pop engineering mag full of fluff. The bulk of their online daily news updates are derived from corporate press releases, which they maybe follow up with a phone call or two to make even fluffier.
One little detail that they left out of the article is that E-Tenna Corp. is all of four days old...or at least they announced their existance in a May 14 press release. They were just spun off from Titan, who sent out a flurry of press releases to get mouthpieces like EE Times to talk them up, so they can carry the snippits around to people with more money than engineering aptitude as they beg for additional financing. (They also announced completion of first-round financing of $7 million when the corporation was announced four days ago, but $7 million isn't nearly enough.) They have no products or customers, so they need to talk up their unproven ideas to attract investors.
Looking over the text of the submission, I'm inclined to think the Anonymous Coward is an employee of Titan or E-Tenna Corp. as well. Who else but a corporate flak is going to spew something like "nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now." Either you know about antennas and you know that's false, or you don't know about antennas and so you wouldn't be that enthused about this amorphous possible future development.
I'm curious, though, about something you gushed about in the heat of the moment:
The idea here is to have a radio device capable of transmitting/receiving over a wide range of wavelengths without any moving parts...
How is it possible to use something called microelectromechanical technology without the benefit of moving parts?
Now be gentle. That was the AC quote, and not one of our illustrious /. editors speaking.
Granted, they make enough silly mistakes, but I won't hold this one against them.'
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
So tell me. How long until the government is trying to ban a 7 line Perl script which turns a cell phone into an illegal scanner?
pornking
The article opens... "Using proprietary magnetic-isolation and RF MEMS-based antenna-reconfiguration technologies"....
Thankfully many fundamental technologies (lightbulbs, etc.) were developed before copyright laws were that heavily developed. If this e-tenna development is as huge as it seems, and if copyright laws get exaggerated, this could be quite a pain. Not that I'm accusing this company of a monopoly already, in fact I would think it more likely that they get bought out by somebody big (MS anyone?). It's just frightening, as this might be the really first major development technologically that has an extreme level of copyright protection.... the inventors should certainly get credit and cash, but competition should be allowed as well.
not the forward bias voltage, but the reverse voltage. Increasing the reverse voltage increases the distance between the charges on both sides of the junction, which decreases capacitance. And variable resistors are easy, too: FETs can be made into variable resistors for small signals by varying the gate-source voltage, when the drain-source DC bias is zero.
Inductors, variable or fixed, are difficult to build into an IC. They are intrinsically dependent on size for performance. I guess that is where the "mechanical" part of this device comes in: to vary the value of inductors.
However, never discount the possibility of a clever idea coming along. In the 1920s, a car radio was deemed impossible to build, because it had been "proved" theoretically that the minimum size for inductors was such that it was impossible to fit them in the volume available in a car. Then, around 1930, a school drop-out named Bill Lear, who had never heard of that "proof", actually built a practical car radio and started the Motorola company.
(BTW, about thirty years later he built the first personal jet plane and started the Learjet company. Bill Lear has a place of honor in my Engineering Hall of Fame)
Well son, where the hell have you been? Electrically variable resonant circuits have been a feature of RF synthesizers since at least the late 70s. Phased arrays, scanning arrays all use similar techniques, as have electrically adjustable filters based on nonlinear materials such as indium antimonide. This is a nice approach, but it's hardly revoultionary and still doesn't solve the isolation problem or linearity issues for CDMA.
Look, SlashDot's staff is perfectly capable of reporting on software issues and leftist politics, and can probably write a good line of code. Stick to your expertise. Don't bother bullshitting us about RF if you can't hack vector calculus, don't dream Maxwell in your sleep, haven't brought a Beowulf cluster to its knees doing FEA, never drew an arc from a kilovolt power supply while warming yourself above those cherry red vacuum tubes in the final, and can't sling at least 20 WPM from a Vibroplex...
...-.-
Hey now! I kinda like that "chiropractor" chick!!
Sure it deserves a patent. Many simple ideas have been patented (rightly or wrongly, so to deny this technology a patent would be rediculous. Sure it's a simple small advancement but some of the most important advances were simple and small, for eample, Einstein. He didn't develop the mathmatical transform used in Special relitivity, he just found an application for the equasion (and made a few ajustments).
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And finally, contrary to the AC who submitted the story, the antenna has evolved quite a bit in the last few decades -- that's why cellular phones are possible at all. You might want to go check out a Radio Amateur's Handbook from the early 1980's and read the section on 2 meter autopatch to see what was required to get this functionality in the not too distant past.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
'"Yet," said Auckland, "it gives you very high isolation between the antenna and the circuit board -- and also between the handset and the user's head and hand. The specific absorption rate is one-third that of alternative, internal [antenna] offerings."'
--- In the battle between the axis of evil and the one of stupidity, choosing intelligence is disloyal.