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 GH
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 of the water.
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: (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 GH
Re:B.S. Alert (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 of the water.