Microwave Engineering Europe - December 2007 - (Page 10) 10 NEWS By JP Joosting, Microwave Engineering Europe IN BRIEF Alvarion wins WiMAX order for Nigeria Alvarion’s 802.16e mobile WiMAX technology has been selected for deployment by Monarch Communications Ltd., a privately owned company and WiMAX license holder across several Nigerian states. Data and VoIP services, using Alvarion’s self-install customerpremises equipment will be offered to businesses, SOHO, SME and residences. Rollout is planned to begin in Lagos and later in Abuja and Port Harcourt. Alvarion (Tel-Aviv, Israel) has more than 3 million units deployed in over 150 countries. In the third quarter of 2007, Alvarion’s revenues reached $60.6 million, an increase of 5 percent from $57.5 million in the second quarter of 2007, and 39 percent from $43.7 million in the third quarter of 2006. www.mwee.com/204201912 RF-MEMS aims to tune mobile wireless antennas dynamically As an aspiring fabless semiconductor house, WiSpry Inc. (Irvine, Calif.), recently laid claim to sampling the world’s first integrated radiofrequency (RF) micro-electro-mechanical system. The MEMS chip — a digital capacitor array on a CMOS die — can match a cell phone’s antenna impedance dynamically, rather than having it set at the factory, saving dropped calls and extending battery life. And that’s just the start, says WiSpry, for its forthcoming line of RF-MEMS devices, which the company says eventually will yield the holy grail of RF: software radio — an ultra-wideband communications channel that can be tuned to different bands anywhere in the spectrum. “In the long run, we want to offer a completely tunable RF-MEMS front end — almost a software radio on-a-chip,” said co-founder of WiSpry, Jeffrey Hilbert. “But we are beginning at the beginning — that is, with matching antenna impedance with our tunable capacitor arrays.” Keeping the antennas’ impedance matched to the RF front-end in a cell phone has become increasingly difficult, as a result of the trend to make antennas internal. Internal antennas tend to couple the RF signal to the user’s body, so that just picking up the handset can change the antenna’s impedance. Today, electrical engineers design a passive impedance-matching network that can handle the difference between holding the handset and lying it flat on a table, but WiSpry claims its active network can adapt to even unforeseen impedance-matching situations, such operating a handset wearing gloves. “It sometimes takes a design engineer four weeks to design an impedance-matching network for the antenna on a new cell phone model,” said Hilbert. “But with our tunable capacitor array, the impedance matching can be done dynamically, shortening handset design time and improving performance.” WiSpry, a five-year old startup, just decided to start talking about its RF-MEMS development work because it has begun sampling its first chip — an array of 80 digital capacitors on a die, yielding a programmable 10-fold dynamic range in capacitance. The chip won’t be ready for customers until next year, but one cell phone handset maker has already signed up for the dynamically matching antenna-impedance application. By adding the tunable digital capacitor array to its cell phone — which can dynamically adjust its impedance in 10 microseconds — a cleaner signal gets through, resulting in fewer dropped calls, extending the range of the mobile wireless service, and lowering the transmission power required, thus extending battery life of the handset. www.mwee.com/203102929 Qualcomm readies mobile broadband Snapdragon chips Qualcomm Inc. is delivering on the promise of its Snapdragon platform and has started shipping the first two chipsets in the range to device manufacturers. The QSD8250 and QSD8650 are the first chips based on the Snapdragon platform, the company’s multi-mode development platform for wideband CDMA, CDMA2000 and higher data rate follow-on versions of the communications standards. The platform integrates a 1-GHz control processor called Scorpion based on ARM’s Cortex instruction set supported by an array of 600MHz DSP and accelerator cores for baseband and video processing that offer 128-bit single instruction multiple data functionality. The QSD8250 supports HSPA data rates of up to 7.2 Mbits/second on the downlink and 5.76 on the uplink, with full backward compatibility. The dual-mode QSD8650 supports HSPA, as well as CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev. B, with full backward compatibility. www.mwee.com/204201914 Anite, Agilent team for LTE handset test devevelopment Communications test equipment specialists Anite plc and Agilent Technologies Inc. are combining their efforts to develop mobile handset testing gear that will conform to the emerging Long Term Evolution standards. The move means an end to Anite (Fleet, England) developing its Nevis LTE test platform and using the Agilent hardware, while continuing to develop its software for the combined testers. The deal means Anite having to write off £3 million. “We have spent a great deal of effort and money developing the Nevis hardware platform and bringing it to prototype stage. But it makes huge commercial sense to combine forces with Agilent, whose products and technology we already use in some of our platforms. The strategic deal is a positive for both companies and means we can reduce development costs and speed the process”, according to Nigel Coxon, managing director of Anite Telecom. Coxon added the company hopes to claw back some of the development costs of the platform by licensing the IP to other companies developing testing gear in a non-competitive field. He added that the payoff of the developments so far and the joint effort going forward is unlikely to show commercial benefits for several years. “LTE handsets are still three to four years off. The technology’s development, and that of the testers to support it, is following much the same patterns we saw for W-CDMA (3G), but on the other hand, we see huge interest in the testers we are developing from those involved in LTE handset design and development,” said Coxon. www.mwee.com/204201924 Microwave Engineering Europe ● December 2007 ● www.mwee.com 010_MWEE.indd Sec1:10 23/11/07 13:50:54 http://www.mwee.com/204201912 http://www.mwee.com/203102929 http://www.mwee.com/204201924 http://www.mwee.com/204201914 http://www.mwee.com
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