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Technology

First Fully Digital Radio Transmitter Built Purely From Microprocessor Tech 88

Posted by samzenpus from the new-way-to-listen dept.
Zothecula writes For the first time in history, a prototype radio has been created that is claimed to be completely digital, generating high-frequency radio waves purely through the use of integrated circuits and a set of patented algorithms without using conventional analog radio circuits in any way whatsoever. This breakthrough technology promises to vastly improve the wireless communications capabilities of everything from 5G mobile technology to the multitude devices aimed at supporting the Internet of Things (IoT).
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First Fully Digital Radio Transmitter Built Purely From Microprocessor Tech More

First Fully Digital Radio Transmitter Built Purely From Microprocessor Tech

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  • B.S. Alert (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lije Baley ( 88936 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @08:04PM (#49193243)

    No actual info in article, just hype and buzzwords.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by raind ( 174356 )

      You mean like IoT? I cringe when I see that lol.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by Bing Tsher E ( 943915 )

        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:3, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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.'

          At a guess: the engineer came up with some cool ideas that simplified things/made them smaller/gave some technical advantage, then marketting completely misrepresented their work via this festering pile of half-understood buzzwords and hype.

          Outputting a stream of bits into an antenna? With no convential radio circuits (like filters, DA converters, PWM, amps etc)? No. Just no.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by aXis100 ( 690904 )

          That's a bit harsh and fails to see the significance.

          From the article: "There are no analog circuits, no filters, no chokes, none of the traditional circuitry and components expected in a radio transmitter."

          If it can be built as an peripheral chip, it can also be built onto the same silicon as a microprocessor.

          • Right. Then it's a peripheral chip embedded onto the same die as a microprocessor. And still not a microprocessor.

        • Re:B.S. Alert (Score:5, Informative)

          by mixed_signal ( 976261 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @09:53PM (#49193833)

          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.

          • 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."

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by itzly ( 3699663 )

            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

        • This is both NOT the first time, and as stated, NOT purely microprocessor tech.

          For the real McCoy, look back to the 70s, with the Altair.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kohath ( 38547 )

      From the we-don't-really-know-how-radios-work dept.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by bug1 ( 96678 )

      For the first time in history, a prototype story has been created that is claimed to be completely buzzwords,

    • I don't even have to read the article to say '..no, that's completely wrong'. You have to have some minimal RF circuitry in any transmitter or receiver or it just plain won't work; you have to have at least the final RF amplifier circuit, otherwise where do you get transmit power to the antenna? Even purely digital communications devices (read as: WiFi, for instance) have this. You can put much of it in silicon now, but there has to be some external to it, too, and if it has any serious transmit power, the

  • BS - You can't patent algorithms (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Virtucon ( 127420 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @08:08PM (#49193269)

    Must be a slow news day. You can't patent algorithms [legalmatch.com]

    • You can try... and there's a high chance that a jury wouldn't know that.

    • Must be a slow news day. You can't patent algorithms [legalmatch.com]

      So, how do you explain the fact that the RSA public key encryption algorithm was patented for 20 years?

      • How can a guy get a patent for a method to exercise cats with a laser pointer? [google.com] It happens and there's always one patent examiner who doesn't do the job correctly, but that's the overall problem with patent reform right? Laws change, rulings can be overturned but for now at least you can't patent an algorithm. You can patent a software invention however that uses algorithms but that software invention must be innovative and unique.

  • For the first time in history ...

    This [instructables.com]. Or This [radioartisan.com].

  • Sounds way too good to be true... but it should make the lives of the FCC a living Hell... I mean how many people would willingly use the crowded 2.4 GHz spectrum for anything if they had a cheap and easy alternative? Looking forward to apps named FreqManip for all of my bottleneck bypassing needs... yeah I'll believe it when I see it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by everett ( 154868 )

      Before you consider doing that you should look up "notice of apparent liability for forfeiture" I think the average fine is 25,000 for willfully transmitting when you don't have permission to do so. And the FCC has nice new direction finding equipment.

  • The trick is a clean signal with no harmonics (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    No problem generating RF with digital circuits; it has been done for decades. The trick is to generate clean frequencies with no significant harmonic content and no spurs. Now perhaps the cicuits used in this article are digital and analog on one silicon substrate. Certainly a DAC can be made using a semiconductor resistor network fabbed on the same substrate as the digital electronics. And capacitors and inductors can be fabbed on a silicon substrate. I would like to see the details of what they are actual

  • Oh Come On, it's a Press Release (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Thursday March 05, 2015 @08:22PM (#49193369) Homepage Journal

    OK, no real technical data and some absurd claims here.

    First all-digital transceiver? No. There have been others. Especially if you allow them to have a DAC and an ADC and no other components in the analog domain, but even without that, there are lots of IoT-class radios with direct-to-digital detectors and digital outputs directly to the antenna. You might have one in your car remote (mine is two-way).

    And they have to use patented algorithms? Everybody else can get along with well-known technology old enough that any applicable patents are long expired.

    It would be nicer if there was some information about what they are actually doing. If they really have patented it, there's no reason to hold back.

  • The article seems to be full of PR, but from what it describes I'm guessing this is a delta sigma front end and they are selecting off a suitably placed alias to do the modulation. If they have managed to get the noise shaping right then conceivably a standard antenna could suffice as the aliasing filter, which would be quite an achievement. Also getting the timing and jitter performance right are tricky issues they would have to be solved in a low cost product. I can't imagine what else they could mean by
  • People have done this on TI calculators (& likely other systems with similarly little shielding & sufficient clock rates). No hardware support needed—just cause some long enough trace (e.g. on the data bus) to oscillate at the correct frequency. Granted, a 6 MHz Z80 can pretty much only only do AM radio (& can only be picked up right next to the radio), but the principle is not new.

    • Yeah well TI Calculators are not part of the IOT, so they're irrelevant.

      Among the major epoch's of mankind, the IOT will stand shoulder to shoulder with the dawn of the MBA and the first marketing degrees.

      Full speed ahead.

    • Digital logic (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Is built from analog parts.

      • Not really. Unless it's possibly ECL digital logic, where the transistors are operated in a linear region. The 'analog parts' you speak of are run in saturated switching mode, i.e. not analog.

  • Utter garbage (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ozoner ( 1406169 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @08:56PM (#49193585)

    I could build a "Fully Digital Radio Transmitter" in a few minutes using a Crystal and a CMOS gate.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Well, *I* can build a fully-digital radio transmitter using a 9v and a paperclip!

  • We did this in 1967 on the IBM 1620 (Score:5, Informative)

    by k2backhoe ( 1092067 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @09:00PM (#49193607)
    The 1620 was an all digital machine built of discrete transistors. As an undergraduate, we wrote programs that caused the machine to alternate between two loops at a variable rate. The computer radiated so many harmonics that this could be heard all across the AM band where no strong station existed. We programmed it to play (mostly) classical music, "Flight of the Bumblebee" was the perennial favorite. Any truly all digital transmitter will generate harmonics outside of the allowable FCC band, so at the very least they need a really good analog bandpass filter on the output.
  • All digital circuitry is very noisy. It generates harmonics and switching noise over a huge range of the radio spectrum, meaning it MUST have output filtering to work in the real (legal) world. Analog circuitry uses less power for the same RF output, making it a poor choice for mobile use. And if it's not mobile then you won't care about adding a few capacitors and resistors to filter the output.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Yes, but I'm sure they don't count all those pesky things like pcb materials and copper traces as "analog components" like the rest of us microwave engineers. To me, pcb substrate, capacitors, inductors, pcb substrate are all the same shit. Just different ratios of materials...

    • The antenna and matching network form a bandpass filter. For a data converter we'd call them a type of reconstruction filter. (It's funny to see people say things like "all digital circuitry is noisy," and yet they probably listen to MP3 or CD audio...)

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by itzly ( 3699663 )

        (It's funny to see people say things like "all digital circuitry is noisy," and yet they probably listen to MP3 or CD audio...)

        Why is that funny ? It's not like people can hear MHz-GHz range switching noise in their MP3/CD audio.

  • All digital transmit is easy and has been done with FSK, BPSK, OOK, and numerous other K's by many people lots of different ways. We do this as a class exercise at 228 MHz using a Digilent FPGA board (Nestor, J. A., & Nadovich, C. (2009). An FPGA-based wireless network capstone project. In 2009 IEEE International Conference on Microelectronic Systems Education, MSE 2009 (pp. 53–56).) Much more difficult is all digital _receive_ as you need to conquor the selectivity and sensitivity problems. It's
  • It's very easy to make a digital transmitter. It's very hard to meet the thousands of compliance specs (spectral emission mask, spectral flatness, adjacent channel interference, etc).
    One day this will happen, but I'm not convinced it's today.
  • If motherboards came with this maybe your desktop pc could be used for simple multiroom audio

  • "The significance of this new technology cannot be overstated:"

    I believe you just did.

  • Hertz and Marconi beat them to it (Score:3)

    by Gim Tom ( 716904 ) on Thursday March 05, 2015 @11:23PM (#49194201)
    Uh, The spark gap transmitters used by Hertz and Marconi were digital (Morse code is a digital protocol) and for the most part the only tuning was done by the antenna. Latter there was some sort of tank circuit or resonant tuning added, but I don't think so in the beginning.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by itzly ( 3699663 )

      Sure, but now try to make that into a nice clean modulated signal compliant with FCC regulations.

  • I'm already doing this at home (Score:3)

    by naich ( 781425 ) on Friday March 06, 2015 @05:39AM (#49195175)

    I already listen to music from my Raspberry Pi using it as a transmitter with no analogue components - http://naich.net/wordpress/?p=... [naich.net]

  • Depending on the frequency band (i.e. not terahertz), it's not that hard to make an arbitrary digital signal encoder that produces an analog signal, after a little bit of filtering. For instance, it's common enough to do audio by wigging a single bit and then passing that through a low-pass filter.

    If they're claiming to do it without ANY analog hardware, then I call BS. However, there is filtering inherent in the digital circuits. I could imagine using a genetic programming to learn code sequences that p

  • Absolutely no idea why this is something "new". Any oscillating (digital) circuit is an RF transmitter - though this is almost always an unwanted side effect.

    There have been a lot of people (too many references to site) who do things like make FM transmitters out of a Raspberry PI.

    I used to play with making my Apple ][+ do wonky things to transmit weird noise to my FM radio back in the day...

  • They have been doing this with sound for some time. Radio is just faster. (Yes, I know that is WAY oversimplified). At radio frequencies, any electrical engineer will tell you there is no such thing as digital. The edge of a square wave is not perfectly straight. It is a noisy curve based on the impedance of the circuit and the current used to drive the transition. There is inductance and capacitance in every conveyance of electricity. In a "clean" circuit, the effect of this parasitic L/C is either negligi

  • This isn't new at all, far less "the first". The Altair 8800 didn't have any sound capabilities so people used to tune there radios to the clock frequency of the main data bus and feed data to it at frequency's that were modulated by the bus speed. It sounded like crap but it was far from a tuned system and that was back in the 70's. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] I might believe there is some type of breakthrough in this if they had actually put any real information about it in the article but all tha

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