The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and Mini-Circuits have entered into a licensing agreement to permit the use of NRAO-developed technology in a new suite of commercial electronics products. The licensing agreement is facilitated by NRAO’s Technology Transfer Office, which was established to fulfill the Congressional directive to support commercialization of federally funded research and technology development.
The new signed agreement that covers a part of the NRAO portfolio of radio frequency filters known as cascadable absorptive filters, will foster the development of new radio-frequency-based technologies in a wide range of commercial applications. The underlying technologies for this novel class of filters were developed by NRAO’s Central Development Laboratory, where some of the world’s most sophisticated radio astronomy technologies are engineered.
Filters are a fundamental building block of nearly every RF system in existence today, used to eliminate unwanted signals in receiver and transmitter architectures. Traditional filters work by reflecting undesired signals back to the source, which can potentially cause systemic problems such as intermodulation products and gain ripples that adversely affect desired signals in the pass band. This new, patented filter topology, which was developed by NRAO scientist Matt Morgan, avoids these problems by absorbing unwanted signals in the stop band.
