Germans rethink wireless - Communications

Electronic News, Oct 7, 2002 by Gale Morrison

Nations constantly wrangle to call innovations their own, and the same is true in the history of automobiles and photography. But anyone who has ever driven a BMW or used a Leica camera knows that regardless of when German engineering did get there, serious sophistication was the result.

The same historical phenomenon may be coming to wireless communications. Next month at the gargantuan Electronica show in Munich, Germany-where everything from light rail cars to fiber optic modules is shown in miles of exhibition space every fall-the Berlin company Nanotron Technologies will unveil the first transceiver silicon based on its multidimensional multiple access (MDMA) technology.

What's garnering gasps in the halls of communications engineering are the range and data rates-over 60 meters and more than 2Mbit/sec.-coupled with power consumption on the order of a keychain RFID tag. But the smile that follows those gasps comes from the chirping.

"The essence of Nanotron's technology is that they use the chirp technology," says Heinz Arnold, a company spokesman. "It's based on the principle in nature. It's the way dolphins and bats communicate. By chirping, signals or symbols are coded in a very, very effective way because the energy distribution is very constant over time. This is exactly what you want overtime, that you are not allowed to go over a certain low level of energy," Arnold says.

Nanotron started 10 years ago by casting aside. mobile telephony's code division multiplexing and time division multiplexing because they were too power-hungry and interference prone. The company's researchers, led by founder and CEO Manfred Koslar, spent nearly five years in deep research, looking at how all wireless communication is done: the oldest amplitude modulation (AM) route, the less noisy frequency modulation (FM) route, and finally phase modulation, which brings us to CDMA and TDMA.

CDMA is, of course, the single domain of Qualcomm Corp. of San Diego. TDMA is the method that was used by everyone who put up a wireless phone network and didn't want to pay Qualcomm.

Nanotron stuck to the line of thinking that there could be devised a hardware and software protocol combination that took the best aspects of all three modes of modulation for optimal transmission and power consumption. The result was MDMA.

"We spent five years looking into the fundamental questions for future transmission systems," Koslar says. "One thing we learned is that the classical interpretation that the transmitter power determines the range of a transmitter is not really true."

The almost perfect spectrum of the chip-impulse yields almost perfectly optimal use of the channel capacity within a wireless network's strict bandwidth and power constraints, whatever they may be. And they always want power to be low.

Further, MDMA, with the constant chirp signaling, does not require DSP for echo reduction or error correction. Thus staying analog, the power consumption is drastically reduced. Arnold says that Nanotron believes this approach can enable a communication node with a battery life of five years.

Nanotron readily admits this is a giant leap of faith in communications engineering. Thus the company set out to prove the technology with a 2.4GHz band--the industrial, scientific and medical band home to all the 802-dots such as Bluetooth and WiFi. The result is silicon germanium (SiGe)-based silicon that can deliver the 2Mbit/sec. data rates up to 60 meters away. Outdoors the range is 700 meters.

Nils Jasper, who came on board in July to sell the stuff and holds the title of chief sales officer, says the company is extremely interested in finding a CMOS manufacturing partner to lower costs and finding licensing partners in the United States at the same time. Nevertheless, SiGe versions of the Nanonet TRX product will be shipping in volume in Q1 2003.