ParkerVision claims advance in RF chips

Electronic News, Dec 15, 1997

JACKSONVILLE. FLA.--ParkerVision, a development company based here, is claiming "a major breakthrough in wireless radio frequency (RF) technology that has the potential to revolutionize wireless electronics by obsoleting many of the techniques and associated circuitry commonly employed in today's RF receivers."

The company plans to market the technology which it calls a new category of RF receiver--the "Universal Direct Conversion Receiver." ParkerVision sees applications for these UDCRs in: cordless telephones, both home and PCS/cellular, pagers, garage door openers, toys, security systems, user input devices and peripherals for consumer electronics and personal computers, walkie/talkies, microphones, speakers, audio monitors, intercoms, local and wide area networks, utility meter reading, smart cards, identification tagging and others.

The ParkerVision Universal Direct Conversion Receiver is said by the company to support broadly deployed transmitter communication formats and transmitter frequencies from 1 MHz to 1 GHz. The first generation of the technology has been incorporated into an integrated circuit (IC) which has been code-named "Eddie."

ParkerVision says that "Eddie efficiently receives most types of RF transmissions and processes (them) down to an optimized base-band signal in a single step with miniscule distortion."

Jeffrey Parker, ParkerVision CEO, said: "We believe our years of investment to develop this technology will prove to have been the proper strategy as ParkerVision emerges as a significant influence in the high growth wireless industry."

Mr. Parker noted that the company has now completed the first phase of its growth and will move into a heavily marketing-oriented phase as it tries to establish partnerships with key vendors. "Now that we have completed the first generation of our wireless technology, we are looking forward to working with the many product companies that can benefit from this revolutionary breakthrough. We plan to establish mutually beneficial partnerships and to be a genuinely valuable resource for those in the wireless products business. We will do this through product development relationships and licensing agreements," he said.

Mr. Parker said he felt there were "new wireless architectures that our technology now makes possible," citing a "very low-cost FM data link that can move megabits of digital data and has over 100 times (20db) more interference rejection than a traditional FM link." This part's "reliability and low cost is lacking in today's RF electronics," Mr. Parker asserted.

The Eddie part is currently available. It is said to consume less than 10 mA of power, pass signal bandwidths up to 3MHz, provides claimed "excellent signal to noise allowing for high gain/high sensitivity," and costs a fraction of the price of current RF electronics that Eddie replaces.

Company CTO David Sorrells said that the list of the UDCR's features "reads like the wish list of RF and wireless product designers." He went on to say that the company spent years struggling with what he termed "the many mutually exclusive goals imposed by traditional RF electronics." Traditional RF design and manufacturing complexity far exceeded any of the other electrical engineering disciplines the company worked with, he said, adding, "We knew there just had to be a better way."

Mr. Sorrells said that the technology "can be implemented in a number of IC foundry processes making it a natural to combine with currently available ICs such as microprocessors, digital signal processors, and application specific circuits."

Publicly-held ParkerVision will move toward a more complete systems solution next year and expects to provide operational frequencies up to several GHz in 1998, along with companion system ICs. ParkerVision designs and develops wireless technology and audio/visual products. The company has a significant number of patents filed on wireless and video technologies and has also been granted patents on various video technologies and systems.