FROM
THE EDITOR
A research organisation in Belgium claims to be leading the way in Software Defined Radio. This week, European Editor Dick Selwood visited IMEC and learned their secrets - or at least some of them.
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Kevin
Morris – Editor
Embedded Technology Journal
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IMEC
Research for the Real World
You are designing a device and you want to add radio connectivity; what type of interface do you want? Wi-Fi? 3GSM? Bluetooth? WiMAX? Wouldn’t it be great to use just a single chip-set (or even a single chip) to deal with all these different standards? Software Defined Radio (SDR) aims to achieve this, and Cognitive Radio goes even further and automatically selects the standard, so a device will connect to 3 GSM on the move and then switch seamlessly to WiFi for telephony over IP at home.
Just to remind you, and simplifying greatly, wireless standards normally cover two things: the frequency and bandwidth at which the signal is transmitted and the transmission protocol. So equally there are two elements in a receiver: the front end – effectively the tuner - which selects the signal (working in the analog domain) and then the baseband, which carries out digital processing to convert the signal for use, for example as an audio signal for entertainment.
There are several companies who are working in this area: Technoconcepts has created a demo RF front-end of a single implementation for four different flavours of WiMAX, and BitWare and AsicAhead are also working in the front end. Others are working on a baseband device. However, a government founded research lab in Belgium is working on a complete solution, has products for both front end and baseband, and is looking like it will be a leader in this technology. [more]
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