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
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.
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:0)
I think you missed the part where they said "First Fully Digital Radio Transmitter Built Purely From Microprocessor Tech".
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.