Industry News

Wireless Design Centre Thinks Twice

Ember’s Cambridge, UK-based IC design facility is set to double in size by the end of 2006, following the announcement of the company’s development partnership with STMicroelectronics on ZigBee projects. Its 11-strong hardware design team has already developed two ICs at the site, including the ZigBee industry’s first single...
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Columbus Heads for US

At a ceremony to mark the delivery of the European laboratory for the International Space Station (ISS), Columbus, by EADS SPACE Transportation to the European Space Agency (ESA), German Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasised the international cooperation aspects of Columbus and the ISS, as an example for a world with...
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Project MESA on Track

At a meeting of the MESA Project attended by over 50 participants from Europe, the US, Canada and China, important steps were taken to bring broadband mobile communications to the public safety communities in both Europe and North America with five new proposals by manufacturers being received. These technical...
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It Pays to Integrate Toll Solutions

Within the scope of a large-scale test, the Siemens Industrial Solutions and Services (I&S) Group in Australia has proven that the previously separate technologies for the collection of road toll fees — microwave-based Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) and satellite-based Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) — can be integrated...
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GaAs Device Market Will Break Through $3 B in 2006

The Strategy Analytics annual five year outlook for the gallium arsenide microelectronics industry, “GaAs Industry Forecast: 2005–2010,” predicts that GaAs device revenues will grow by 36 percent over 2005 to 2010, breaking the $3 B barrier in 2006. Overall market growth will continue to be derived from wireless markets,...
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Radio Frequency Identification: Evolution of Transponder Circuit Design

A basic RFID system consists of three components: an antenna, a reader and a transponder, commonly called a tag. Tag designs are the most well researched over the years and different designs came about to suit their application in various fields. This ...
Radio frequency identification (RFID) is an area of automatic identification that has quietly been gaining momentum in recent years and is now being seen as a radical means of enhancing data handling processes, complementary in many ways to other data capture technologies such as bar coding. RFID systems involve...
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A 2.4 GHz CMOS Transceiver Single-chip RF Front-end for ISM-band Wireless Communications

A 2.4 GHz CMOS transceiver single-chip RF front-end for ISM-band wireless communications is presented. The CMOS RFIC contains a gain-controlled low noise amplifier (LNA), a series-type T/R switch and a power amplifier (PA) with diode linearizers, which...
Due to the fast development of wireless communications, a low cost, high performance, highly integrated technology is needed for system-on-a-chip (SoC) implementations. The CMOS technology provides a good solution for SoC integration. 1 Recent improvements of the standard CMOS process make it possible to implement RF blocks, such as...
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UHF RFID and Tag Antenna Scattering, Part II: Theory

In Part II of this work, a numerical solution, using a reasonable estimate for the tag IC impedance, is shown to provide accurate estimates of the scattering effects of tag antennas. A greatly simplified scattering theory for tag arrays is also present...
In Part I of this article, 1 a number of experimental results were presented, suggesting that interactions in arrays of tag antennas play an important role in determining when a UHF RFID tag can be read, even when no other scattering is present in the environment. How can these...
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