Incremental Improvements Define The 2012 Mobile World Congress |
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Louis E. Frenzel, Editor in Chief
The usual players all showed up at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with lots of improved devices, but no real game-changing breakthroughs... |
Silicon oscillator matches quartz performance at lower cost
Advances such as improved long-term frequency stability and thermal hysteresis have allowed microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) resonators to pose a serious challenge to quartz crystal resonators...
VHF coverage added to in-building antenna
Fractal Antenna Systems, Inc. has added VHF frequencies to its Universal Access Ceiling Monopole (UACM) antenna...
Rectangular connectors are well suited for military and aerospace
C&K Components has developed a family of high reliability rectangular connectors. ...
GPS-quality TCXO in a 3.2 mm x 2.5 mm LCC package
Vectron International has announced its smallest temperature compensated crystal oscillator (TCXO) to date. ...
GaAs MMIC subharmonic image-reject mixer
Mimix Broadband, Inc. has introduced a gallium arsenide (GaAs) monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) sub-harmonic image reject mixer for use in transmit and receive frequency conversion applications. ...
2008 bookings for Paveway bomb system begin with Asian orders
Raytheon Company has been awarded more than $100 million worth of contracts in the first two months of 2008 by countries in the Asia-Pacific region for their Paveway family of airborne precision-guided bombs. ...
Britain and Italy to acquire MRAPs
Force Protection Industries, Inc., Ladson, S.C., has been awarded a $115 million contract modification under a previously awarded firm-fixed-price contract to acquire 174 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles and associated test sets, spares and support services. ...
Saab secures 310-million-dollar Thailand deal for Gripen fighters
As a result of Thailand's decision to purchase an integrated air surveillance system from Sweden, the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV) has placed an order with Saab valued at $310 million. ...
Solar panels may become the largest semiconductor market yet
Are cheap and ubiquitous solar panels almost here? ...
Energy efficient 0.3 V microchip
Researchers at MIT and Texas Instruments have unveiled a new chip design for portable electronics that can be up to ten times more energy-efficient than present technology. The design could lead to a variety of devices that will last far longer when running from a battery. The innovative design was presented Feb. 5th at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco by Joyce Kwong, a graduate student in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Kwong carried out the project with a number of her MIT and TI colleagues. The team demonstrated the ultra-lowpower design techniques on TI's MSP430, a widely used microcontroller. The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual. While most current chips operate at approximately one volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volt. Reducing the operating voltage, however, is not as simple as it might sound because existing microchips have been optimized for many years to operate at higher standard voltages. Therefore memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power-supply voltages. One key to the new design, was to build a high-efficiency, DC-to-DC converter that reduces the voltage to the lower level — right on the same chip, thereby reducing the number of separate components. The redesigned memory and logic, along with the DC-to-DC converter, are integrated to realize a complete system-on-a-chip solution. One of the biggest problems the team had to overcome was the variability that occurs in typical chip manufacturing. Because at lower voltage levels, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip become more problematic. Designing the chip to minimize its vulnerability to such variations was a huge part of the task. So far the new chip is a proof of concept. Commercial applications could become available in five years, maybe even sooner. The work was conducted at the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories and was funded, in part, by a grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. ...
Power shirt harvests energy from the motion of the wearer
Nanotechnology researchers at Georgia Tech are developing a "power shirt" able to generate electricity to power small electronic devices for soldiers in the field, hikers and others whose physical motion could be harnessed and converted to electrical energy. ...
Making sure there is no confusion between nuclear-tipped and dummy warheads on B-52s
Much has already been written regarding the B-52 bomber that took off from an Air Force base in Minot, North Dakota in August with six nuclear-tipped AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missiles and then these missiles were transferred on a 1400-mile flight to the air force base in Barksdale, Louisiana. ...
Radio communications analyzers test HSDPA high data rate and W-CDMA band XI
Anritsu Company introduced HSDPA High Data Rate and W-CDMA Band XI test options for its MT8820B/MT8815B Radio Communication Analyzers to create single-instrument solutions for testing next-generation high data rates and Tx/Rx characteristics. ...
New universal WiMAX digital radio head
Powerwave Technologies, Inc. announced the launch of its fully-integrated universal WiMAX Digital Radio Head (DRH) which offers multi-carrier operation and class-leading efficiency, delivering twice the output power of competitive solutions. ...
RFID technology to protect rare genealogy collection
The Robeson County Public Library in Lumberton, N.C., is installing the latest radio frequency identification technology (RFID) from the Integrated Technology Group (ITG), a division of Vernon Library Supplies Inc. ...
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