Arkivator Telecom announced the release of the 0.9 m antenna, which is specifically designed to be light and slim with high gain, which makes it easy to handle and reduces transportation costs. It has been designed to complement the company's existing portfolio of antennas in 0.3, 0.6 and 1.2 m sizes and meet requests from customers for an antenna below 1 m, but with a gain comparable to a 1.2 m antenna.
The new type of radome gives the antenna benefits like low wind loads, which, in turn, reduce the load at the tower. The 0.9 m antenna is available in 6 to 38 GHz, both single and dual polarization with the possibility to upgrade from single to dual polarization in-field. Easy to transport and handle on site the antenna meets Arkivator’s tough quality standards and has been thoroughly tested for resistance to humidity, condensation, salt, vibration and wind.
Fujitsu presented reference designs of its MB86L01A 2G/3G, MB86L10A 2G/3G/LTE-FDD and MB86L10A 2G/3G/LTE-TDD RF multi-mode transceivers that eliminate 3G and LTE TX and RX inter-stage SAW filters and low noise amplifiers. These RF transceivers are compatible with a wide range of industry basebands and feature a high-level programming model for controlling the radio using open standard digital interfaces. The compact transceiver module enables cell phone manufacturers to reduce component count, board space and bill of materials. For DigRF 4G V1.0 and 2G/3G plus simultaneous LTE-FDD and dual-band LTE-TDD support (bands 38 and 40), the company offers the MB86L12A RF transceiver.
Also showcased was the new Fujitsu MB39C326 power management IC, which is designed to power the radio frequency power amplifiers in mobile handsets and other mobile products that use a single-cell Li-ion battery. The converter switches at 6 MHz, enabling designers to use a smaller inductor. That can reduce the board space of the power management circuits by up to 50 percent. The optimized voltage-control mechanism for full-charge and discharged-battery states automatically switches between buck operation (stepping down the voltage) and boost operation (stepping up the voltage). This prolongs battery life and efficiency, resulting in longer operation on a single charge.
NXP Semiconductors and security specialist Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) announced the full validation of a joint software solution offering secure interfaces between the handset, NFC functionality and secure elements such as the SIM card. This solution enables NFC to be integrated securely into mobile handsets based on the Android platform and other operating systems. In addition, the validated software will meet the needs of mobile network operators who are specifically demanding secure elements within the handset. The first Android handset supporting this enhanced functionality is expected to be launched during the second quarter of 2011.
The NFC software solution is based on the integration of NXP’s NFC controllers in mobile handsets with G&D’s secure software solutions, as well as its expertise in securing transactions via the secure element. Security and ease of use are vital for broad consumer acceptance of NFC.
The new software-based secure NFC solution provides full flexibility to support all modes provided by the NFC technology. These include reading and writing to NFC smart tags, peer-to-peer data sharing, mobile payments and access control. The code is open source and is designed to provide full flexibility for integration in multiple platforms and usage with solutions from different suppliers.
Texas Instruments Inc. introduced what it claims to be the industry’s widest bandwidth, fully-integrated transmit/receive processors with digital pre-distortion (DPD) for 3G and 4G wireless base stations, remote radio heads and government communication systems. The GC533x family features a duo of turn-key processors that provide a complete and highly flexible digital transmit and receive solution for wide-bandwidth and multi-antenna wireless base stations at a fraction of the cost of high-gate-count FPGAs and without the time and investment required to develop a custom ASIC solution. The company showcased a complete system evaluation and reference design kit.
The GC533x family provides up to 148 MHz of fifth order corrected transmit bandwidth with crest factor reduction (CFR), along with wideband digital up/down converters with fractional re-samplers, 48-bit numerically controlled oscillators (NCO) and automatic gain control that can support four transmit and eight receive antennas simultaneously. When combined with the low-cost, high-performance TMS320C6748 floating point DSP, the GC533x platform offers customers a high-performance adaptive DPD algorithm or the ability to implement their own DPD IP.