Communications

Scottish researchers have developed a way to dramatically cut the cost of active phased-array antennas, and are looking to interest car makers. “We know we can develop and manufacture a 17mm-thick antenna you could put into the roof of a car,” Matthew Boyd, chief operating officer of Fortel, told Electronics Weekly. A satellite TV system including the antenna would only ...

Speech recognition technology with a claimed accuracy rate of 95 per cent has been developed by researchers at Toshiba. The middleware, which also features a text-to-speech (TTS) engine, will be available from the third quarter of this year, with support for nine languages. The package is designed to fit in minimal memory, with the automatic speech recognition requiring 100Mips, and ...

Motorola subsidiary Freescale Semiconductor is stepping up the pressure in the battle to control ultra wideband (UWB). The company has laid out its roadmap for ultra wideband products, which includes plans to deliver three product families over the next year. Freescale made the announcement at the Wireless Connectivity World Expo in Amsterdam. The new product families include the industry’s first ...

Oki Electric is claiming a world first for high speed optical communications with its demonstration of a single channel optical device capable of transmitting and receiving data at a rate of 160Gbit/s over a distance of 640km. The company highlighted the importance of the high data rate technology for the distribution of digital cinema films in real-time. The 160Gbit/s data ...

UK chip firm Phyworks is contributing technology to an IEEE standard to extend the reach of 10Gbit/s fibre comms by a factor of 10 and significantly reduce costs. Existing methods of sending 10Gbit/s data through up to 300m of standard fibre are expensive, and include wavelength division multiplexing and single-mode fibre. Phyworks specialises in electronic dispersion compensation (EDC), which enables ...

WiMAX will be operational in the second quarter of next year, according to Intel, which announced its chip designed for the long range broadband fixed wireless technology last week. The company has a beta-version of the chip, code named ‘Rosedale’, which conforms to the 802.16-2004 specification. Samples are being provided to companies with which Intel has been working. “We expect ...

Formby-based Fizzle Technologies has developed a spread-spectrum technique it calls ‘correlation’ for measuring antenna patterns in real-time. It could be used to improve accuracy in indoor ranges, or to give mothballed ranges a new lease of life, in place of complicated off-line computational methods. “As you receive a piece of information spread across a range of frequencies, you can de-spread ...

Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs is to lead R&D programmes on next-generation laser and optical communications after receiving contracts worth $26m from the US Department of Defence. The first contract covers the second phase of the Coherent Communications Imaging and Targeting (CCIT) programme with the goal being to demonstrate new technologies for high-speed and long-range laser communication. The resulting system will ...

Bath based PicoChip has signed an agreement with Florida company Airspan Networks to develop and market an upgradeable reference design for WiMAX basestations. The product, known as SoftMAX, is a software defined radio implementation of the current 802.16–2004 WiMAX standard. It will also support the upcoming mobility enhancements to the standard. “Reference designs and interoperability are two of the most ...

More records were broken at Broadcom in the September quarter, with revenue for Q3 coming in at $646.5m, an increase of 0.8 per cent sequentially and an increase of 51.9 per cent from Q3 2003. Net income was $49m, compared with net income of $63.8m for Q2 and a net loss of $6.3m for the year-ago quarter. “During the third ...