The world’s first fully digital radio
transmitter promises to improve the wireless communications capabilities of
everything from 5G mobile technologies to the multitude devices aimed at
supporting the Internet of Things, or IoT (a proposed
development of the Internet in which everyday objects have network connectivity
that allows them to send and receive data).
Dubbed Pizzicato, the prototype radio consists of
an integrated circuit that outputs a single stream of bits, an antenna, and not
much else. It has no conventional radio parts or digital-to-analogue
converter. Algorithms perform the necessary ultra-fast computations in real
time, thus enabling standard digital technology to generate high frequency
radio signals directly.
"Our first trial of the technology has created
14 simultaneous cellular base station signals," says Monty Barlow,
director of wireless technology with Cambridge Consultants, the product
development and technology consultancy firm which created Pizzicato.
But it’s the digital technology of the
Pizzicato-based radio that excites Barlow. Like mainstream processing, he
explains, the device should benefit from Moore’s Law (the observation that
processor speeds, or overall processing power for computers will double every
two year), thus shrinking in cost, size and power consumption with each new
generation of silicon fabrication.
“We believe that, in the same way that
microprocessors went from being expensive to being cheap enough to be installed
in many everyday items, our technology can do the same for radio systems,” he
adds.
The implication looms large because of the limited
availability of radio spectrum bands, particularly in the more popular lower
frequency ranges (less than 1 GHz). Good radio spectrum is a scarce resource.
Only low frequencies (1GHz or lower) propagate well over distance or through
walls, so they are in great demand. Analog circuits or even the more advanced
analog-digital amalgams used in software-defined radio (SDR) are rapidly approaching
their limits.
“Crowding 50 analogue radios together on one
chip, switching their operational parameters every few microseconds and
expecting them to work at 60GHz is an analogue designers nightmare,” Barlow
says.
One way to improve efficiencies at these
frequencies is the employment of dynamic switching capabilities to sense the
radio environment and switch various settings as required, in real time. In
other words, by using a type of "cognitive wireless" technique to
intelligently control the way that signals are sent and received, therefore,
make maximum use of the available spectrum. Cognitive radios are an evolution
of software-defined radios. They implement baseband processing functions in
software and use agile radio frequency (RF) front ends that can operate across
a wide range of frequencies.
BCC Research, in its report on software-defined radios, forecasts a market size of $56.3
billion in 2019, up from $47.7 billion in 2014, across the military and public
safety communications sectors.
Greater efficiency requires the use of dynamic
or ‘cognitive wireless’ techniques to sense the radio environment and switch
parameters on the fly. This could give access to more of the estimated 90% of
the allocated spectrum which is not in use at any one time.
Barlow adds finally, "if we’re going to get high-speed broadband to
every mobile phone in the world, we’ll need lots of tiny, high-performance
radios in those phones. The radios will be squashed together in a way that
analog just doesn’t tolerate, whereas a Pizzicato-like digital radio could also
be programmed to generate almost any combination of signals at any carrier
frequencies, nimbly adapting its behavior in a way that is impossible in conventional
radios.”
For more BCC Research information technology, visit http://www.bccresearch.com/market-research/information-technology
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