First ever all-digital radio transmitter invented

8 April 2015 Electronics Technology News Telecoms, Datacoms, Wireless, IoT Editor's Choice

Technology innovation firm Cambridge Consultants of the UK has successfully completed initial trials of the world’s first fully digital radio transmitter.

Unlike software-defined radio (SDR), it’s not a mixture of analog and digital components, but rather a completely digital radio that can enable new ways of using spectrum intelligently.

According to the company, the latest breakthrough – codenamed Pizzicato – opens the door to a new dynamic way in which the predicted 100 billion IoT (Internet of Things) devices can operate together in a crowded radio spectrum, and will enable the creation of 5G systems with multiple radios and antennas.

The transmitter consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna – with no conventional radio parts or digital-to-analog converter. Patented algorithms perform the necessary ultra-fast computations in real time, making it possible for standard digital technology to generate high-frequency radio signals directly.

According to Monty Barlow, director of wireless technology at Cambridge Consultants, the first trial of the technology has created 14 simultaneous cellular base station signals, but more exciting is the potential. “If we’re going to get high-speed broadband to every mobile phone in the world, we’ll need lots of tiny, high-performance radios in those phones,” he points out. “The radios will be squashed together in a way that analog just doesn’t tolerate, whereas a Pizzicato-like digital radio can follow Moore’s Law to smaller size and lower power consumption.

“It could also be programmed to generate almost any combination of signals at any carrier frequencies, nimbly adapting its behaviour in a way that is impossible in conventional radios. It is early days for this technology but we believe radio design has reached a turning point.”

Good radio spectrum is a scarce resource; only low frequencies (1 GHz or lower) propagate well over distance or through walls, so they are in great demand. Greater efficiency requires the use of dynamic or ‘cognitive wireless’ techniques to sense the radio environment and switch parameters on the fly. This could give access to more of the estimated 90% of the allocated spectrum which is not in use at any one time.

Making use of the higher carrier frequencies of 10 GHz and beyond, however, will require techniques such as meshing and beamforming to circumvent the inherently poor range, and the analog parts of radios are becoming an increasing bottleneck.

“Crowding 50 analog radios together on one chip, switching their operational parameters every few microseconds and expecting them to work at 60 GHz is an analog designer’s nightmare,” said Barlow. “With Pizzicato, we have created a glimpse of future disruptive technology – a radio built purely from computing power.”

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