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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)
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).
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?
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
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...
...-.-