The article says: "The Pizzicato digital radio transmitter consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna ".
That doesn't sound like 'Purely from Microprocessor Tech' to me. It sounds like a strap-on peripheral chip, which is not at all 'Purely microprocessor.'
Most of the people commenting on this story have no clue about signal processing or radios. It is quite possible to feed a "stream of bits" to an analog filter and create a clean analog signal. This is effectively what 1-bit delta-sigma data converters do, and it is close to what Class-D audio amplifiers do. The trick is indeed doing this with wide bandwidth signals and sufficient oversampling to have good signal quality. To get wide bandwidth at 5GHz, they probably are running the sampling rate in the GHz range to get a few 10's of MHz bandwidth and picking off (filtering/selecting) a harmonic at 5GHz. An antenna and matching network are a type of filter network. There's a lot of innovation in these areas, and it's annoying to see uniformed/.'ers dumping on an area they don't understand.
The posts here I'm referring to are mindlessly dumping on the whole idea or possibility of there either being anything novel here or that it would actually work. Similar techniques are quite common in signal processing and audio, and we've been approaching all-digital radio technology incrementally for about 20 years now. The biggest novelty here is that they're claiming to be effectively all digital at 5GHz. While "Microprocessor Tech" may be an annoying marketing buzzword or mangling of terminology, the digital techniques and circuitry are valid, some of them are probably novel, and there are indeed many similarities to digital processing circuits found in microprocessors, as the original press release states. There's hype in their release about "no traditional radio parts," where there's likely to be at least an antenna match, but that's not the level of detail these folks are writing about here. Disappointing for a technology oriented site.
What you say is plenty familiar to some of us, but RTFA and you'll see that it gives no technical clue as to what their innovative contribution is. It just sounds like it was written to attract uninformed investors.
Well, they'd better have something to show... From the release: "Cambridge Consultants is demonstrating Pizzicato at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, March 2-5, stand 7B21 in Hall 7."
This is effectively what 1-bit delta-sigma data converters do, and it is close to what Class-D audio amplifiers do
But they do this using frequencies that are much higher than the frequency of the resulting waveform. That's okay when you want to generate 20kHz waveforms, but you can't do that with a 5 GHz signal using current technology.
And generating a lower frequency signal (in 10's of MHz range), and picking off a high harmonic doesn't work either. You'll get terrible efficiency because you're throwing away most of the spectrum, and you also need narrowband, adjustable filters. That blows the "all digital" right out
You can not get anything worthwhile done without raising a sweat.
-- The First Law Of Thermodynamics
B.S. Alert (Score:5, Insightful)
No actual info in article, just hype and buzzwords.
Re: (Score:1)
You mean like IoT? I cringe when I see that lol.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The article says: "The Pizzicato digital radio transmitter consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna ".
That doesn't sound like 'Purely from Microprocessor Tech' to me. It sounds like a strap-on peripheral chip, which is not at all 'Purely microprocessor.'
Re:B.S. Alert (Score:5, Informative)
Most of the people commenting on this story have no clue about signal processing or radios. It is quite possible to feed a "stream of bits" to an analog filter and create a clean analog signal. This is effectively what 1-bit delta-sigma data converters do, and it is close to what Class-D audio amplifiers do. The trick is indeed doing this with wide bandwidth signals and sufficient oversampling to have good signal quality. To get wide bandwidth at 5GHz, they probably are running the sampling rate in the GHz range to get a few 10's of MHz bandwidth and picking off (filtering/selecting) a harmonic at 5GHz. An antenna and matching network are a type of filter network. There's a lot of innovation in these areas, and it's annoying to see uniformed /.'ers dumping on an area they don't understand.
Re:B.S. Alert (Score:4, Informative)
The posts here I'm referring to are mindlessly dumping on the whole idea or possibility of there either being anything novel here or that it would actually work. Similar techniques are quite common in signal processing and audio, and we've been approaching all-digital radio technology incrementally for about 20 years now. The biggest novelty here is that they're claiming to be effectively all digital at 5GHz. While "Microprocessor Tech" may be an annoying marketing buzzword or mangling of terminology, the digital techniques and circuitry are valid, some of them are probably novel, and there are indeed many similarities to digital processing circuits found in microprocessors, as the original press release states. There's hype in their release about "no traditional radio parts," where there's likely to be at least an antenna match, but that's not the level of detail these folks are writing about here. Disappointing for a technology oriented site.
Re: (Score:3)
What you say is plenty familiar to some of us, but RTFA and you'll see that it gives no technical clue as to what their innovative contribution is. It just sounds like it was written to attract uninformed investors.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, they'd better have something to show... From the release:
"Cambridge Consultants is demonstrating Pizzicato at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, March 2-5, stand 7B21 in Hall 7."
Re: (Score:2)
This is effectively what 1-bit delta-sigma data converters do, and it is close to what Class-D audio amplifiers do
But they do this using frequencies that are much higher than the frequency of the resulting waveform. That's okay when you want to generate 20kHz waveforms, but you can't do that with a 5 GHz signal using current technology.
And generating a lower frequency signal (in 10's of MHz range), and picking off a high harmonic doesn't work either. You'll get terrible efficiency because you're throwing away most of the spectrum, and you also need narrowband, adjustable filters. That blows the "all digital" right out