Microwave Engineering Europe - May 2008 - (Page 4)

4 NEWS By JP Joosting, Microwave Engineering Europe IN BRIEF Mesh network monitors wireless greenhouses Wireless mesh networking startup GreenPeak Technology (Utrecht, the Netherlands ) has partnered with Kronos to develop a terminal to manage greenhouse harvesting. The project also involved Kronos value added reseller Hortimax for the management system that will monitor the activity and location of individual mobile harvesting carts. The terminal uses GreenPeak’s wireless mesh technology to transmit data from individual mobile harvesting carts to routers, which enables the data to be gathered and analyzed in a central coordinator unit and, the companies say, will monitor individual pickers’ efﬁciency. Compared to the existing set-up, where only the average picking weight per corridor and not per individual picker was known, the latest system claims to have increased overall greenhouse productivity by 15 percent. Kronos says one reason for choosing GreenPeak’s wireless networking technology was its performance in radio unfriendly environments. The mesh technology is self-healing and self-forming, making the approach easy and inexpensive to install. www.mwee.com/207401848 Renesas collaborates with IMEC on reconﬁgurable RF transceivers Renesas Technology has entered into a strategic research collaboration with IMEC, Europe’s leading independent research center in the ﬁeld of nanoelectronics, to perform research on 45 nm RF transceivers targeting Gbit/s cognitive radios. To this end, Renesas has joined IMEC’s software-deﬁned radio (SDR) front-end program. This research program includes reconﬁgurable RF solutions, high-speed/low-power analog-todigital converters (ADCs) and new approaches to digitize future RF architectures. Researchers from Renesas will reside at IMEC to closely collaborate with IMEC’s research team. In this way, they will build a fundamental understanding and develop robust solutions for Renesas future mobile electronics products. In the near term, IMEC’s SDR-front-end program targets the development of a new generation cost-, performance- and power-competitive reconﬁgurable radio in 45 nm digital CMOS. This radio will have a programmable center frequency from 100 MHz to 6 GHz and programmable bandwidth from 100 kHz to 40 MHz covering all key communication standards, with a merit comparable to state-of-the-art single mode transceivers. The research program builds on IMEC’s previous groundbreaking 130 nm RF transceiver results (published at ISSCC 2007), namely the world’s ﬁrst prototype of a true SDR transceiver IC (SCALDIO). Also, further evolutions of IMEC’s record breaking ADCs (merit record by IMEC at ISSCC 2008 of 40 Msamples/s, 9 bit, 54 fJ/conversion step) will be developed within this collaboration. www.mwee.com/207400816 Group formed to pool IPR to speed LTE deployment Some of the biggest players in the mobile communications equipment sector have joined forces to establish rules for licensing patents related to Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. The aim is to avoid the bitter patent and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) rows that broke out during development of 3rd generation mobile equipment. The companies that have now agreed to work towards predictable and more transparent costs for licensing intellectual property for LTE gear include Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless, Nokia, Nokia Siemens Networks and Sony Ericsson. They invited other interested parties to join the initiative that is intended to ease the pain of licensing IPR related to both LTE and its related Service Architecture Evolution standards (LTE/SAE) effort. The effort is crucial since many companies hold IPR related to different aspects of LTE technology, and patent pooling, as the process is known, is thought to offer a sufﬁcient reduction in risk and collectively beneﬁt an otherwise competitive industry. It should also speed up product introduction and network implementation. One of the main suppliers of devices for mobile broadband, Qualcomm Inc., is missing from the original backers of the initiative. The reason for that may be that it has still not given up on its own ﬂavor of mobile broadband, dubbed Ultra Mobile Broadband, as a potential standard. The framework is based on the prevalent industry principle of fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) licensing terms for essential patents. This means that the companies agree, subject to reciprocity, to reasonable, maximum aggregate royalty rates based on the value added by the technology in the end product and to ﬂexible licensing arrangements according to the licensors’ proportional share of all standard essential IPR for the relevant product. The companies are supporting a maximum aggregate royalty level for LTE essential IPR in handsets as a single digit percentage of the sales price. For notebooks with embedded LTE capabilities, a single digit dollar amount has been proposed. “The adoption of this initiative will reassure operators of the early widespread adoption of LTE technology throughout the consumer electronics industry,” according to Hkan Eriksson, Senior Vice President, General Manager and Chief Technology Ofﬁcer for Ericsson. And Ken Stanwood, Executive Vice President Technology and Standards, NextWave Wireless suggested: “Today’s devices contain a multitude of different technologies. To ensure all patent holders are treated fairly without stiﬂing the market, it would be preferable for patent holders to offer reasonable terms.” www.mwee.com/207401804 3G race underway in St Petersburg Ofﬁcials from MTS, a top Russian mobile operator, said that the company expects to invest more than $400M from 2008-2010 for development of 3G networks in St. Petersburg, according to local reports. In addition, the CEO of MTS, Leonid Melamed, said 2007 revenues were up 25 percent to more than $8 billion, Interfax reported. MTS, owned by parent company Sistema and claiming 84 million subscribers in Russia and the CIS, will announce ﬁnancial results next week. Operators are concentrating on St. Petersburg because Moscow frequencies necessary for 3G are held by the military. www.mwee.com/207200605 Microwave Engineering Europe ● May 2008 ● www.mwee.com http://www.mwee.com/207400816 http://www.mwee.com/207401848 http://www.mwee.com/207200605 http://www.mwee.com/207401804 http://www.mwee.com

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Microwave Engineering Europe - May 2008 News Contents Comment Cover Feature: How to Succeed as a GaAs Foundry Wireless Networking: Wireless Coverage Where Everybody WINS Wireless Networking: Achieving Good Coexistence in the 2.4 GHz ISM Band GPS and Satellite: GPS developments: Galileo Moves Forward with Successful Giove-B Satellite Launch — Broadcom Targets AGPS in Mobile Phones and Devices Raising the Bar for the Radio: Making 802.11n Work Reducing Power Consumption in Ultrawideband Chips WiMax Catches Second Test Wave Products Calendar

Microwave Engineering Europe - May 2008

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