The Journey of Radios From Hardware to Software

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is carrying a story all about the process of replacing radios with software. The article tells the tale of Vanu Bose, son of the man who started the Bose company, and his quest to bring software to what was previously a hardware-only enterprise. He met a lot of resistance in the 90s to his ideas, because processor technology was not up to the task. Now that technology has caught up with Vanu, his software (and other products like it) are increasingly replacing now-outdated hardware components. 'Well-established companies like Motorola and Ericsson now use elements of software-defined radio for their base stations. But Mr. Bose was the first to come to market with software that could handle multiple networks with the same equipment. Software radio appears to offer an elegant solution to what has been a vexing problem: how to have a single handset, like a cellphone, communicate across multiple networks. For instance, the G.S.M. standard, for global system for mobile communications, is used broadly in Europe, and most notably in the United States by AT&T.'"

Comments

Re:An interesting idea

[inflex]

Got schematic of this device?

Re:Obvious Next Step

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not quite a "duh" nor is it clear without apply a lot of brain-power. In an analog radio there is no "hard-wired logic", its just the physical properties of the components engineered to work with electromagnetic waves. Software radios are only possible because digital processors are cheap/small/fast enough to approximate what the analog components are physically doing by crunching some very clever math (FFTs) in real-time.

Re:A little too much feature creep.

[FooAtWFU]

Dear Mr. Barely Glanced at the Fine Summary:

This is about radios in a variety of communication devices. Like cell phones. And cell phone towers. Especially cell phone towers. Not so much your Sony Walkman et al.

Re:Obvious Next Step

[Dun Malg]

That is a logic, in the sense of a function that converts inputs to outputs in a regular way. Just not a boolean logic. No, that's not considered "logic" in the electronics world. "Logic" in the electronics sense means circuits that do useful work using two states (high/low) to represent true and false. These are considered digital systems, as opposed to analog systems, one of which is the classic coil-capacitor-diode AM radio receiver.