Trending RF & Microwave News Stories this Week(2-6 July, 2018)

World’s First CMOS 140 GHz Radar-on-Chip System with Integrated Antenna

Imec introduced the first CMOS 140 GHz radar-on-chip system with integrated antennas on standard 28nm technology at the International Microwave Symposium 2018. This achievement is an important step in the development of radar-based sensors for a myriad of smart intuitive applications, such as building security, remote health monitoring of car drivers, breathing and heart rate of patients, and gesture recognition for man-machine interaction. Click here to read more.

Leti Completes LPWA Field Trials of New Waveform for 5G IoT Networks

Leti recently completed field trials of its IoT tailored LPWA technology. Termed the LPWA-CB trials, the results have shown significant performance gains in coverage, data-rate flexibility and power consumption compared to leading LPWA technologies.

Leti’s LPWA includes its patented flexible approach to the physical layer, Turbo-FSK waveform. It also relies on channel bonding, the ability to aggregate non-contiguous communication channels to increase coverage and data rates. The field trials confirmed the benefits of Leti’s LPWA approach in comparison to LoRa and NB-IoT, two leading LPWA technologies that enable wide-area communications at low cost and long battery life. Click here to read more.

German Company Develops Innovative Flat Panel Antennas for Satellite Communications Systems

ALCAN Systems, a German-based smart antenna technology start-up, announced that it has reached an important milestone in the development of a new Flat Panel antenna for the Customer Edge Terminals (CET) used in satellite-based communications system.

In August 2017, ALCAN raised EUR 7.5 million in Series A funding from a consortium of investors (including SES) to bring its next-generation low-cost, ultra-thin flat smart antennas to market.

ALCAN has been working with SES Networks to develop a new generation of low-power flat smart antennas called  O3b mPOWER to be used over the O3b MEO constellation. Significant progress has been made towards a 2D-electronically steerable flat antenna operating at Ka band. Click here to read more.

Ultra-Low-Power Sigfox-Verified Modules for the IoT Market

LITE-ON Technology has announced the official “Sigfox-Verified” certification for its wireless communication modules WSG300S, WSG303S, WSG304S, and WSG306S. The new modules integrate RF and microcontroller technology from STMicroelectronics and are ready for the booming market for Internet of Things (IoT).

The WSG300S module supports both RCZ2 (America, Mexico and Brazil) and RCZ4 (Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Columbia and Argentina) while the WSG303S, WSG304S, and WSG306S are designed for RCZ1 (Europe, Oman, Iran and South Africa). The full product line is fully compliant with the regulations and manufactured in compact sizes with excellent quality. Click here to read more.

Single Antenna Solution for Cellular and GNSS Technologies

Fractus Antennas has just launched a new reference design that explains how to use the TRIO mXTEND chip antenna component to get the GNSS and Cellular frequency bands at the same time.

Thanks to its modular, multiband and multiport configuration the same antenna component can be adjusted to cover, among others, the frequency bands used for operating at the Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and BeiDou) while it covers worldwide 2G, 3G and 4G cellular bands.

TRIO mXTEND is the newest member of the Virtual Antenna family and it is also the only one with a multiport configuration, this means that the chip antenna component can be tuned at two different frequency regions of interest simultaneously through the proper adjustment of the matching network. Click here to read more.

Transmitter with Ultra Fast Frequency Hopping to Protect Wireless Data from Hackers

Today, more than 8 billion devices are connected around the world forming the Internet of Things. By 2020, this number is expected to rise to more than 20 billion devices.

However, there is one problem, these devices will be vulnerable to hacker attacks that can locate, intercept, and overwrite the data, jamming signals and generally create havoc. One method to protect the data is called “frequency hopping,” which sends each data packet, containing thousands of individual bits, on random, unique radio frequency (RF) channels, so hackers can’t pin down any given packet. Hopping large packets, however, is just slow enough that hackers can still pull off an attack. Click here to read more. 

Qorvo FEM Powers New Commercial 802.11ax Carrier Gateway

Qorvo has announced that its high efficiency 5GHz front end module (FEM) QPF4528 is part of a new, commercially available draft 802.11ax carrier gateway. The new gateway, which integrates Qualcomm Technologies IPQ807x family of 802.11ax chipsets, provides up to four times higher wireless networking throughput and better performance in bandwidth-intensive applications than previously deployed carrier gateways. Click here to read more.

5G Chipset Market to Reach $22.41 Billion by 2026

According to a report published by ResearchAndMarkets, the 5G chipset market is expected to grow from USD 2.03 Billion in 2020 to USD 22.41 Billion by 2026. The market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 49.2% from 2020 to 2026. The major driver for the growth of this market will be the growing demand for high-speed internet and broad network coverage with reduced latency and power consumption. Moreover, increasing M2M/IoT connections and increasing demand for mobile data services are propelling the market growth.

In the IC type segment, ASIC is expected to hold the largest share of the 5G chipset market during the forecast period. Demand for ASICs in high-end smartphones is likely to be the key factor propelling the growth of the market. Many companies are in the process of developing ASIC chipsets to emerge as early providers and showcase commercial readiness for 5G. Click here to read more.

Aaronia Drone Detection System Used to Supervise the Kim Jong & Donald Trump Meeting

The AARTOS AI based Drone Detection System developed by Aaronia AG was used at the historical meeting between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump in Singapore. The fully automatic drone detection system AARTOS detects the RF emissions of any drone and its remote control and offers a live situation awareness display including highly featured 3D flight plots.

The AARTOS system offers unique ultra-high range (10-15km) 360 degree dome coverage. The detection technology is based on the patented AARONIA ISOLOG 3D Tracking Array Antenna, a UWB real-time RF receiver “SPECTRAN V5” and a highly complex AI based Tracking-Software. The Drone Detection System allows very detailed analysis of any RF emissions e.g. “hopping” patterns of drones but also any other RF signals e.g. cell phones enabling to detect even the latest 4G based drones. The rapid proliferation of micro/mini UAV is a growing potential threat to national and commercial security. Click here to read more.

Elisa Launches World's First Commercial 5G Network in Finland

Elisa in Finland has become the first operator in the world to begin commercial use of a 5G network. The first person to use the 5G network was Anne Berner, Minister of Transport and Communications, who made a video call to Kadri Simson, Minister of Economic Affairs and Infrastructure in Estonia. The video call is yet another historical achievement by Elisa: the first GSM telephone call in the world was also made using Elisa’s network. They have now started selling 5G subscriptions. Click here to read more.