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Handhelds Hardware

Antenna Breakthrough Called E-tenna 59

Posted by michael from the but-we're-not-a-dot-com,-we-swear dept.
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now. The widely respected EETimes has a story about a company called e-tenna that is using microelectromechanical technology to bring the "elusive goal of a software-defined radio one step closer to reality". This is the type of thing that deserves a patent!" The idea here is to have a radio device capable of transmitting/receiving over a wide range of wavelengths without any moving parts, and instead of a set of inductors and capacitors for tuning, it does most of the "work" in a general-purpose chip.
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Antenna Breakthrough Called E-tenna More

Antenna Breakthrough Called E-tenna

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  • Cherry red vacuum tubes? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You probably have a mismatched antenna. The plates should stay black. Or you are trying to make a 6L6 do the job of a 813...

  • Re:Checksum is failing badly... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Finite elements? How quaint. My puny desktop dances through those same problems using integral methods.

  • Blaupunkt did this ages ago.... (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 20, 2001 @02:58AM (#210682)

    I used to be a car audio engineer, working mostly on Blaupunkt. In 1998 they brought a range of high-end radios based on the "Digiceiver" chipset, which basically operates on the RF at a digital level (ie software based tuning and decoding). The Blaupunkt website [blaupunkt.de] has full details of this system, up to a pretty good tech level.

    Basically it operates on a 2 chip basis (both made by motorola to BP specs), the first running the PLL tuning, band selection and stereo decoding, and the second chip altering the sound dynamics (DSP), volume and so on. The theory is that the signal is kept in a digital state much longer and from earlier than in conventional "analogue" tuning systems.

    From what I can see this is very similar.

    Ben^3 (defending the Germans for once)

  • If you don't know anything about electronics go moderate some other story. "Out of the 'loop'" is an inductor pun.
  • "but I bet I can make one [insert cheaper,better,faster,more powerful] than those guys can?"

    Do that *before* they blaze the trail, i.e., have the idea in the first place, prove that it's possible, develop the tools necessary, etc., and then we'll be impressed and you will be entitled to benefit from your work without having to share the take. Otherwise negotiate a contract with them that lets them profit from having made your improvement on their work possible in the first place.

  • When they talk about direct conversion, do they mean going straight from modulated carrier to baseband, eliminating the I.F. strip, like the old TRF radios?
  • I don't quite see how 'GSM won the standards war in the US' - check www.gsmworld.com for the stats, and it's clear that the number of GSM subscribers in the US is tiny. AT&T Wireless are converting from TDMA to GSM/GPRS, and then W-CDMA, but Sprint, Cingular and others are resolutely CDMA2000, largely because that lets them re-use existing spectrum whereas W-CDMA demands new spectrum.

    EDGE is as you say, the key point is that it lets you upgrade to higher speeds within existing spectrum, without a complete overhaul of the radio access network, but it's going to be quite wide-spread. CDMA2000 and W-CDMA will take a long time to roll out to high coverage (some say 2006 or 2007), and EDGE or even GPRS will be used as fill-in for all the rural areas where new, smaller cells can't be justified yet.

    Applications will need to be highly adaptive to varying bandwidth and error rates, even in the brave new 3G world.

  • Need for software-defined radio in cell phones (Score:4)

    by Cato ( 8296 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @09:55PM (#210687)
    The world really needs software-defined radio to achieve the goal of one phone that works everywhere.

    There are already 3 different digital cell phone standards in North America (CDMA, TDMA and GSM), and at least one more in Japan (PDC) - the rest of the world uses GSM, but life is going to get much more complicated with 2.5G and 3G:

    - 2.5G (data rates of 40 to 100 Kbps, packet mode)is mainly GSM or CDMA based, but EDGE is a new radio transmission technology

    - 3G (data rates up to 384 Kbps when mobile, 2 Mbps in buildings) will use W-CDMA in most of the world, with CDMA2000 picking up much of North America. China has just decreed yet another 3G radio standard, TD-SCDMA.

    So, if you want a phone that roams onto all common networks today or in the 2.5/3G world, you'll need a lot of different radio standards supported.

    While I can't tell whether this development is truly important, EETimes seems to think it is, and software-defined radio will be very useful. Just think, you could download a new radio module before going to another country, rather than having to rent a phone and tell everyone your temporary phone number (just like GSM today, but that only has 70% market share globally, even though it just hit the half-billion subscriber mark).
  • The antennas are smaller because the frequencies have gone up, that's it. Your 2 meter antenna is going to be the same as it was in the 1970's. Now wavelengths are just a few centimeters, making the most efficient antenna much smaller.

  • I misspoke myself. I meant "choose" a "general purpose chip". Most chips used in commercial and military hardware are capable of doing a number of modifications to a signal or even straight current with very little instruction/input.

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
    Everyone knows me.
  • What's so special about this "technology"?

    Ever since the end of days for the black and white tv (~1968), capacitor capacitance and inductor variation has been mechanical. It is still the simplest demonstration of controlling the transmission or reception of varying wavelengths. Please note that this is still in "the books".

    I've been working for IC Fabs off and on for the last 4 years. It doesnt take a big company to tell me how to design a "general purpose chip" (as they put it) that will provide me with CONTROLLED resistance and impedence. This is also in "the books". I am surprised that this hasnt been done 100 times already...although chip die is still pretty expensive to throw away on developing for old technology nowadays...Still, this is not special.

    Often wrong but never in doubt.
    I am Jack9.
    Everyone knows me.
  • The idea here is to have a radio device capable of transmitting/receiving over a wide range of wavelengths without any moving parts.

    Uh yeah, no rheostats, that's it. ;-)
    --

  • While he is a bit offensive, he has some points though:
    - in the articles, they said they have designed the "low voltage" MEMS: they haven't built it.

    So for now, wait and see, but it is really too early to say if it has potential..

    - the poster REALLY looks stupid when he says MEMS and "no moving parts" in the same sentence!

    For the SDR, remember than antenna is only one part of the game, if you want truly versatile software radio, you need also huge computing power!
    So at the beginning, I think that SDR will go first into the Base Station, much more earlier than into the handset!
    In fact SDR is possible technically in the BS NOW, but the computing power needed is too expensive to be economically interesting.

    Give Moore law some time, and you will see SDR into the BS..
  • Patent - A temporary monopoly granted to an inventor for one of his inventions. In return, the invention is published, and there's no risk of losing any techniques because the inventor was too secretive. Expires in a relatively short (~20 years) time. After that, the invention is in the public domain and anybody can make one.

    Copyright - The right to control copying of a work, such as music, writing, etc. Granted automatically in the US to any such work, although it's still better to formally register it with the copyright office. Takes forever to expire (~100 years).

    Trademark - A monopoly on a brand name. Must be applied for. Only applies within an industry; two trademarks on the same name may be held if the products that go with them are unrelated. Expires only when the product is no longer made, or when it's not renewed.
  • Sounds nice in theory, but the largest problem with software radio is power consumption. You have to run a sampler at really high frequencies, than have a DSP downconvert at really high frequencies, then you have to cleanup the signal....and then you have all your baseband to process still.

    And remember, the part that consumes the most power cannot be replaced by software (power amplifier)...so you'd have a phone with a 3 hour life. Not very useful. Sounds like a commercial winner right? Eventually they will make it useful, but energy storage techniques are slow to advance.

    CDMA2000 is US! You must be mad! GSM won the 2G standard war in the US because its a simple upgrade to GPRS (18 month life probably), then a simple upgrade to W-CDMA. EDGE has a better chance of survival than CDMA2000 (and remember, EDGE roadmap leads to UMTS/W-CDMA).

    btw, EDGE isn't anything new, its just multi-slot TDMA with pi/4 dpqpsk modulation (damps is TDMA with single-slot, pi/4 dpqpsk). And DAMPS didn't work worth a shiznit.
  • True, but techniques for antennas have improved vastly. You can't solve the wonderful attennae equations for the fields without using finite elements. As computational power has increased dramatically, so has the analysis of antennaes. Have you ever tried to integrate the a sine of a cosine (or is it a cosine of a sine...i forget). And you still have to broadband match because 800 MHz and 1900 MHz have very different quarter wavelengths. And remember, a VSWR of 2:1 is GOOD.

  • I have no connection with E-Tenna thing or with EETimes. However, I would like to step forward and say that for years I have had more respect for EETimes than any of the numerous trade journal that I receive, bar none.

    Just about every other trade journal will take news of a patent as a major technological breakthrough and proof of great technical leadership within a company. EETimes seems to scrutinize the actual technology and give at least some coverage to small companies and graduate student project. They also occasionally cover the arguments of those who identify patent and copyright abuse, attempts to make government works copyrighted, and export restrictions. EETimes does not claim to be a referreed technical journal or even "hard news" like The San Jose Mercury News [mercurycenter.com], but I think it's probably the best trade journal that I have come across. I, for one, respect them as much and usually more than the sources on which Slashdot stories are based.

  • /. suckered? Well, then so was Ars Technica [arstechnica.com] - yesterday.

    I find myself going there [arstechnica.com] more and more every day. It's a real shame.

  • From what I know, I haven't heard of an IC that have variable R, C or L. Also, tha main problem with RF IC are the L and C (well mostly the L) because it is only possible to make plane components in an IC.

    While I don't know of any sort of variable inductors in IC's, they do have variable capactitors. They are called varactors. Essentially, it is a diode capacitance that is controlled by the forward bias voltage. As far I am aware, this is the most common way of tuning RF IC circuits.

  • > It doesnt take a big company to tell me how to design a "general purpose chip" (as they put it) that will provide me with CONTROLLED resistance and impedence.

    If you have to design a new chip for the purpose, it ain't a general purpose chip anymore...

    What they mean is that (until now...) you couldn't just rush off to Radio Shack, and wire some off-the-shelf parts (Nand Gates, Asics, processors, ...) together to obtain a circuit that is tuneable to any given RF frequency.

  • I remember when people used to report products as well as vapourware.
  • Dear You Pair Of Ignorant Fucks,

    Ever heard of licensing a patent, now shut the fuck up.

    Sincerely, James T. Kirk
  • Well, if you have bothered to read the article you'd realize that in fact this new design reduces the amount of dangerous radiation absorbed by the user

    Unless the researchers have succeeded in developing a completely new form of radio frequency radiation in addition to their basic claim (a new type of antenna), the output from any of their "antennas" will be exactly as harmful or benign as the RF from any conventional wire antenna.

    Multiple little technological slips like this in the article cause me to wonder if this isn't a delayed printing of a press release dated April First.

    Years of reading the April annual reports from Larson E. Rapp in QST have helped me develop a highly sensitive Bullshit Filter (BF). And, after reading this article, the meter on my BF is pegged full-scale.

    Ancient saying states that any sufficiently advanced science is indestinguishable from black magic.

    Corollary of ancient saying states that any sufficiently buzz-worded press release is indestinguishable from newspaper representation of scientatific fact.

  • &nbsp

    this is nothing new, check out
    Vanu [vanu.com]
  • No, he means variable capacitors which you need to tune filters on radios.


    -----
    "Goose... Geese... Moose... MOOSE!?!?!"

  • Widely respected EE Times? (Score:5)

    by Argy ( 95352 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @10:54PM (#210705)
    Since when is EE Times widely respected? This is not a peer-reviewed journal, nor a source of significant independent research. It's a typical pop engineering mag full of fluff. The bulk of their online daily news updates are derived from corporate press releases, which they maybe follow up with a phone call or two to make even fluffier.

    One little detail that they left out of the article is that E-Tenna Corp. is all of four days old...or at least they announced their existance in a May 14 press release. They were just spun off from Titan, who sent out a flurry of press releases to get mouthpieces like EE Times to talk them up, so they can carry the snippits around to people with more money than engineering aptitude as they beg for additional financing. (They also announced completion of first-round financing of $7 million when the corporation was announced four days ago, but $7 million isn't nearly enough.) They have no products or customers, so they need to talk up their unproven ideas to attract investors.

    Looking over the text of the submission, I'm inclined to think the Anonymous Coward is an employee of Titan or E-Tenna Corp. as well. Who else but a corporate flak is going to spew something like "nearly everything electronic has drastically evolved over my lifetime with the exception of the antenna up till now." Either you know about antennas and you know that's false, or you don't know about antennas and so you wouldn't be that enthused about this amorphous possible future development.
  • Hmm...I've been using an OpenNIC NS for several months now, and have had no problems. If you're serious and not simply trolling, drop me a note and we can try to figure out what the problem is.

  • /. suckered again (Score:3)

    by pongo000 ( 97357 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @08:50PM (#210707)
    So michael, what are the chances that you have just been suckered into promulgating the hype of what turns out to be just another wireless venture? I think the chances are pretty strong, dear michael, given that solid-state signal synthesis has been around for quite some time now.

    I'm curious, though, about something you gushed about in the heat of the moment:

    The idea here is to have a radio device capable of transmitting/receiving over a wide range of wavelengths without any moving parts...

    How is it possible to use something called microelectromechanical technology without the benefit of moving parts?

  • Receiving is simple, any length of wire will do, but to get a good transmission the antenna needs to be tuned for a certain frequency or range of frequencies. IIRC it has to be a variable of the wavelength. (Aka..1/2,1/4,x2....) this is why you can string up any length of wire to receive radio signals for your TV or Radio, but the transmission station has to be finely tuned for maximum range.
  • Trademark ...

    I think you mean Registered Trademark (r) instead of (tm). Both types serve the same purpose, but a simple (tm) can be asserted as simply as putting a (c) in a document asserts copywrite.

    My understanding of the utility of the value of a Registered Trademark is that you can have it granted, by application, by a governing authority (either Federal or International) to assert the trademark in all markets that government has authority over.

    If two companies called themselves the same name in different states, each could assert a (tm) on their name or products in the market they serve. Going to the expense of actually registering a trademark can break a tie if there's a dispute (both companies enter the same market.)

    --
  • Now be gentle. That was the AC quote, and not one of our illustrious /. editors speaking.

    Granted, they make enough silly mistakes, but I won't hold this one against them.'
  • Lots of antennas use inductor traps, capacitors, and switches to allow them to be used on a wide range of frequency bands. This appears to just be a newer way of doing the switching. But then again, maybe my brain is suffering high SWR's from it being three in the morning.

  • T-shirts anyone? (Score:4)

    by pornking ( 121374 ) on Saturday May 19, 2001 @08:52PM (#210712)

    So tell me. How long until the government is trying to ban a 7 line Perl script which turns a cell phone into an illegal scanner?

  • The article opens... "Using proprietary magnetic-isolation and RF MEMS-based antenna-reconfiguration technologies"....

    Thankfully many fundamental technologies (lightbulbs, etc.) were developed before copyright laws were that heavily developed. If this e-tenna development is as huge as it seems, and if copyright laws get exaggerated, this could be quite a pain. Not that I'm accusing this company of a monopoly already, in fact I would think it more likely that they get bought out by somebody big (MS anyone?). It's just frightening, as this might be the really first major development technologically that has an extreme level of copyright protection.... the inventors should certainly get credit and cash, but competition should be allowed as well.
  • From what I know, I haven't heard of an IC that have variable R, C or L. Also, tha main problem with RF IC are the L and C (well mostly the L) because it is only possible to make plane components in an IC.
  • ...it is a diode capacitance that is controlled by the forward bias voltage

    not the forward bias voltage, but the reverse voltage. Increasing the reverse voltage increases the distance between the charges on both sides of the junction, which decreases capacitance. And variable resistors are easy, too: FETs can be made into variable resistors for small signals by varying the gate-source voltage, when the drain-source DC bias is zero.

    Inductors, variable or fixed, are difficult to build into an IC. They are intrinsically dependent on size for performance. I guess that is where the "mechanical" part of this device comes in: to vary the value of inductors.

    However, never discount the possibility of a clever idea coming along. In the 1920s, a car radio was deemed impossible to build, because it had been "proved" theoretically that the minimum size for inductors was such that it was impossible to fit them in the volume available in a car. Then, around 1930, a school drop-out named Bill Lear, who had never heard of that "proof", actually built a practical car radio and started the Motorola company.

    (BTW, about thirty years later he built the first personal jet plane and started the Learjet company. Bill Lear has a place of honor in my Engineering Hall of Fame)

  • Checksum is failing badly... (Score:5)

    by n9fzx ( 128488 ) on Sunday May 20, 2001 @12:11AM (#210716) Homepage Journal
    "Nearly everything has evolved in my lifetime except the antenna."

    Well son, where the hell have you been? Electrically variable resonant circuits have been a feature of RF synthesizers since at least the late 70s. Phased arrays, scanning arrays all use similar techniques, as have electrically adjustable filters based on nonlinear materials such as indium antimonide. This is a nice approach, but it's hardly revoultionary and still doesn't solve the isolation problem or linearity issues for CDMA.

    Look, SlashDot's staff is perfectly capable of reporting on software issues and leftist politics, and can probably write a good line of code. Stick to your expertise. Don't bother bullshitting us about RF if you can't hack vector calculus, don't dream Maxwell in your sleep, haven't brought a Beowulf cluster to its knees doing FEA, never drew an arc from a kilovolt power supply while warming yourself above those cherry red vacuum tubes in the final, and can't sling at least 20 WPM from a Vibroplex...

  • Those tubes won't last too long glowing cherry red like that, unless they have graphite plates ;)

  • Couldn't they have found a better name? The e-everything naming revolution ended months ago.
  • There is an IR link already available for TI graphing calculators. More limited than RF, but it might be useful, depending on how badly you need to cheat...

    http://sami.ticalc.org/irlink/ [ticalc.org]

  • Yes, that's right! This thing *needs* a patent, otherwise some company won't be able to own exclusive rights on it, and make a pile of money off of it, while many other people can think of very creative uses for it, but can't actually use it.

    Sounds like a great idea to me!

  • Yes, they have invented something. But why shouldn't I be able to say, hey that's kinda cool, but I bet I can make one [insert cheaper,better,faster,more powerful] than those guys can?
  • I never paid enough attention to the goofy ad.
  • Hey now! I kinda like that "chiropractor" chick!!
  • Speeking of antennas, a cool device I want to see is a 802.11b repeter that would cost under $50.

    All what it would need is two antennas and a jumper block to select your channel. That's it. Then I can place these babys along to road and hopefully get the signal to my friends house.

    Anyone know of a device like this?
  • You mean the chip has a bunch of DSPs that synthesise the base signals used for tx/rx? Gee... that's cool... should patent it! Now, how 'bout patenting a controller to regulate the intensity ( of heat genrated by a joule effect device, thus avoiding that nasty burnt egg stink! Sigh...

  • A more efficient way to microwave my brain

    Well done!

  • ...already done this. So, guess a patent doesn't apply now, does it.
  • The clever idea for building inductors into ICs has already come along. I forget what its called (Analog LSI is not really my area of expertise), but you can effectively simulate inductance using a bunch of resistors, op-amps, and capactitors. If you want better frequency response, use more components. I don't know how well this would for a receiver, but it works pretty well for filters, and eliminates the need to populate noisy, interference causing coils all over the PCB.

    Tim
  • Sure it deserves a patent. Many simple ideas have been patented (rightly or wrongly, so to deny this technology a patent would be rediculous. Sure it's a simple small advancement but some of the most important advances were simple and small, for eample, Einstein. He didn't develop the mathmatical transform used in Special relitivity, he just found an application for the equasion (and made a few ajustments).


    --
  • Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha !! You are really great, I like you, you are a funny guy, you suck, you love it, you are a hermaphrodite, you have a very interesting odour, you can really hang one off my moustache, you are an out an out hero, i especially enjoy the way you have concatenated four words together, I'm surprised you didn't net a +1 funny for that, are you German?

    --

  • Gah, that's what you get for installing Win2K... Lost cookies and a bad password meaning no Karma for this lowly techie...

    Bah

    Ben^3 (Kicking himself)

  • Well, it's been almost 20 years since I was studying EE, but I smell a few holes in this that you could drive a space shuttle through.

    • As others have pointed out, how can you have "micro-electromechanical-systems" without moving parts?
    • I am unclear about the part that is "not in the books." While dynamically reconfiguring the antenna would be a neat trick I don't see how that "isn't in the books." This sounds like hype/vapourware ^2.
    • They claim to be able to isolate an internal antenna from the hand wrapped around the phone and the head it's held up against. I don't see this. RF is RF, once it's created it's gonna act like RF, and if it's in the GHz band and it passes through flesh it's gonna get absorbed.
    • It seems like a large part of their pitch is the ability to isolate the TX and RX antennas so they can operate at the same time, without switching between functions. I don't see this either -- if it's resonant to incoming signals in the band, it's gonna receive energy in that band. If it's not, it's not. If the TX and RX are on similar frequencies I don't see this isolation happening no matter what nifty tricks you pull with the antenna structure.

    And finally, contrary to the AC who submitted the story, the antenna has evolved quite a bit in the last few decades -- that's why cellular phones are possible at all. You might want to go check out a Radio Amateur's Handbook from the early 1980's and read the section on 2 meter autopatch to see what was required to get this functionality in the not too distant past.

  • Well, if you have bothered to read the article you'd realize that in fact this new design reduces the amount of dangerous radiation absorbed by the user -

    '"Yet," said Auckland, "it gives you very high isolation between the antenna and the circuit board -- and also between the handset and the user's head and hand. The specific absorption rate is one-third that of alternative, internal [antenna] offerings."'

  • There is an internal antenna, buddy. It's the same way AM works on most radios... the antenna is for FM.
  • Back before there were op-amps that were worth a damn, inucto-capacitant networks were the way to make equalizers/filters. They're still used in boutique models for their phase characteristics. I wonder if this new implimentation will find its way into tunable frequency devices like EQ or DACs.
  • Well, if you had been designing some rf-circuits, you would have known the pain in creating a frontend which meets specs, because half the assumptions which you can make in normal circuit design fail here. If what they claim is true to even a 10% degree, it would be great.
  • hmm so now could I turn my calculator into a 2 way communications device to cheat on tests at school? =)
  • "techno-micro-electro-mechanical" instead of "using microelectromechanical technology"? i know i personally would have enjoyed the article much more had this been the case.

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