As a pioneering step, NEC Corporation along with its sister concern NEC Electronics Corporation has developed a reconfigurable analog baseboard LSI for Software Defined Radio (SDR). The challenge is to make a generic hardware solution that allows radios to cope up with a lot of varied issues involving the various components used in a radio. Issues involving components such as receivers, antennas, transmitters, modulation, demodulation, signal processing and protocol standards have given nightmares to mobile phone manufactures, wireless support providers and broadcasters.
This new LSI baseboard filters the unwanted signals from a frequency range of 400 KHz to 30 MHz and allows complying with multiple wireless standards. This board is not only suitable for the current mobile system but is ready to change the filter type depending on the wireless standards. The chip has dimensions of only 0.57×0.57mm of area. It has been achieved by developing a pulse-width controlled reconfigurable filter.
SDR, which is one of the fastest evolving technologies in the field of telecommunication, has not been able to answer all the questions or issues arising in radio communication/telecommunication theories. The current SDR technology with its switching of transceiver devices makes the chips bulgy. But with LSI analog baseboard with its unique tunable filters, this would become easier and will prove to be key to the whole concept of SDR.
The ultimate use of SDR would be to provide various over the air services in the form of a single device. In other words, by just using our mobile phones, we would be able to receive any channel from any wireless providers that too in multiple countries. It makes the device more versatile.
Source: Fareastgizmos
