Communications

ETSI’s international emergency communications interoperability plugfest revealed that 87% of 285 test pairings were interoperable. The remote event was a cooperation between ETSI, EENA (European emergency number association) and NENA (9-1-1 association) – this was the first time the European event partnered with NENA’s US ICE 9 event. “Crossing borders and oceans, the event helped to ensure efficient, interoperable emergency communications for ...

In a silicon-compatible parallel to fibre optics, MIT is using polymer-based ribbon waveguides to carry data between chips at 105Gbit/s – waveguide dimensions and material are chosen so that it propagates electromagnetic radiation between 200 and 335GHz, over 300mm of waveguide. To handle suitable sub-Thz frequencies, transmitter and receiver were made on a 130nm SiGe BiCMOS process using largely bipolar transistors in ...

Osaka University has teamed up with Rohm to send 8K video at 48Gbit/s over a 300GHz carrier using a simple modulation technique. “In general, such ultra-high-speed data transmission experiments are performed using multi-level modulations via a complex system with high power consumption that uses off-line or on-line digital signal processing,” said team leader Masayuki Fujita. “The present real-time demonstration, which ...

Maxim has announced a suite of integrated circuits and reference designs for industrial automation using IO-Link communications. IO-Link is a short-range (<20m) point-to-point industrial bus developed to connect sensors and actuators to a local hub, from which the data is transferred to a remote PLC (programmable logic controller) via Ethernet or other long-range field bus. “The IO-Link interface allows every ...

Xilinx has announced an enhanced Zynq RFSoC architecture to meet the requirements of a second wave of 5G. The ZynqRFSoC DFE integrates hardened digital front end application-specific blocks for 5G NR performance. It will operate up to 7.125GHz and is futureproofed for 3GPP and O-RAN radio architectures, says Gilles Garcia, director of Wired Communication, at Xilinx.  Release 17 of 3GPP ...

Amazon has released details of its ‘Sidewalk’ medium-distance wireless network, and its silicon partners including Nordic Semiconductor, Semtech, Silicon Labs and Texas Instruments. In a nutshell, it is a combination and coordination of wireless technologies – LoRa and FSK at 900MHz, and Bluetooth Low Energy at 2.4GHz – and shared networking that will offer low-power wireless devices across a neighbourhood bi-directional ...

Silicon Labs has launched a pair of Bluetooth Low Energy system-in-packages: BGM220S is small – 6 x 6mm 1.1mm tall BGM220P is slightly larger, optimised for greater range “BGM220S and BGM220P are among the first Bluetooth modules to support Bluetooth Direction Finding, all while delivering up to ten-year battery life from a single coin cell,” according to the company. The small ...

Adding just the right amount of noise can improve signal to noise ratio in certain non-linear systems. The effect is known as ‘stochastic resonance’, where mixing of noise and signal in the system non-linearity can sometimes push a previously buried signal just above the noise floor. Now researchers at Penn State University have exploited it to improve the sensitivity of ...

The world’s fastest data transmission rate has been achieved by a team of UCL engineers who reached an internet speed a fifth faster than the previous record. Working with two companies, Xtera and KDDI Research, the research team led by Dr Lidia Galdino (UCL Electronic & Electrical Engineering), achieved a data transmission rate of 178Tbit/s – a speed at which ...

A system allowing drones to be controlled from anywhere in the world using only an intrrnet connection has been developed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory run by the US Department of Energy. The technology is being licensed by Horizon31, of Knoxville, Tennessee. The founding team of Horizon31 developed the technology at Oak Ridge. “To make these unmanned systems commercially ...