Communications

What is interesting about Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2016 is that the most exciting developments won’t be in mobile phones. As the mobile industry shows its technology in Barcelona this week (22-25 February) it will be health monitors smart watches, connected cars and smart cities which will grab the headlines and the interest, maybe. The mobile industry no longer only focuses ...

LG has launched the mix and match smartphone, ahead of Mobile World Congress which starts here in Barcelona tomorrow (22 February). As the mobile phone suppliers look at ways to innovate handset design, which has hardly changed in the last five years, LG has come up with the modular smartphone. If you want a B&O audio sound you plug in ...

Researchers at BT’s Adastral Park Labs in Ipswich say they have created a cloud radio access network (C–RAN) mobile service over copper. In partnership with US-based chip firm Cavium they used G.fast technology to deliver cellular data over copper lines at speeds of 150-200Mbit/s. The traditional backhaul connection is optical fibre and BT claims this will remove the need for mobile operators to ...

The growing interest in personal healthcare means that mobile device suppliers need to develop new expertise in biometric technologies. Mio Global, for example, has not only developed a wrist-strap fitness monitor, it has created its own metric for heart rate tracking. Dubbed Personal Activity Intelligence (PAI), it translates your heart rate data and personal profile information into one metric. This ...

Soitec has begun mass production of 300mm RF-SOI substrates for mobile communications. The 300mm version of Soitec’s RFeSI90 substrate enables more highly integrated ICs for 4G/LTE-Advanced communications and the next generation of wireless technologies, including 5G, says the company. There are 300mm RFeSI90 wafer samples available for product qualification. Soitec’s RF-SOI substrates are used in manufacturing antenna switches, antenna tuners, ...

Cree has joined Cisco’s Digital Ceiling ecosystem, offering Ethernet-powered smart lights. The Cisco partnership includes other light makers, plus hardware, middleware software and data analysis companies – Phillips and Microchip are among the members. Cisco sees a future for smart buildings where there are no mains power cables in a ceiling, only Ethernet cables connected with RJ45 plugs. These cables ...

Full LTE carrier aggregation and simultaneous 3G working, and 5G operation, will be possible with its latest 16Goperation/s baseband control processor, said intellectual property firm Ceva at its launch. Like ARM, Ceva is purely an intellectual property (IP) firm which does not sell silicon. Its main products are baseband PHY DSPs – it claims to have IP in every third ...

Sequans has introduced an LTE Cat M chip compliant with the 3GPP Release 13 LTE Advanced Pro standard that defines new narrowband capabilities of LTE for machine-type-communications (LTE MTC). Called Monarch, it is designed and optimized to support low data use, ultra low-power, cost-sensitive, narrowband IoT applications such as smart energy meters, industrial IoT sensors, asset trackers, smart city controllers, ...

Why is IoT and cloud computing likely to be a big deal at Mobile World Congress 2016 which takes place in Barcelona next week? The majority of IoT devices will rely on some kind of wireless connection. This will range from near-field communication (NFC) for mobile payments, to geosynchronous satellites for unattended remote weather stations, and everything in between: Bluetooth, ...

Researchers at Belgium-based Imec and Holst Centre in the Netherlands have demonstrated a low power radio technology which they claim will operate over long distances. They claim a 10-fold reduction in power over traditional 802.11 Wi-Fi based on OFDM (orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing) radio transmission in a paper at IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC 2016) which took place in San ...