Media Release
July 17 2008
New frequency delivers faster wireless
Researchers
at UniSA’s Institute for
Telecommunications Research (ITR), in partnership with Macquarie and
Adelaide Universities, have proven the viability of a new and as yet
untapped radio frequency band which will increase the speed and capacity
of data transfer to wireless devices like laptops and iPods, and
potentially between a home DVD player and high-definition TV.
The GLIMMR (Gigabit Low-Cost Integrated Millimetre-Wave Radio) project is one of the first in the world to use the “millimetre wave technology”, which UniSA Professor of Communication and Signal Processing Bill Cowley says is a new frontier in electronic communications.
“Every time we make a wireless connection, we’re using the radio spectrum and basically we’re running out of bandwidth due to such high uptake of wireless technologies,” Prof Cowley said.
“People increasingly want to watch video media on devices like laptops or i-pods, so these applications need to move large amounts of data in a relatively small time, which is where the new millimetre wave technology comes in.
“One way to achieve very high data rates is to use millimetre-wave radio spectrum, where the frequencies are higher than we have normally employed, and there’s significantly more free spectrum.”
Prof Cowley says the project has proven that the prototype chip technology developed will work and that it provides enormous potential for high speed radio communications in the future.
“An electronic chip developed as a result of this project could allow wireless links from a laptop that are 20 times faster than current speeds and up to 100 times faster than a typical home broadband connection,” he said.
“The chip could also establish a wireless connection between a laptop or desktop computer and a data projector, or even a wall screen within the same room, and eventually link a DVD player with a HD TV – with no wires or cables.”
While the ITR team at UniSA has focused on modem design, system simulation and chip testing to produce a realistic model of how the final system will perform, Prof Cowley says that the collaboration with university and industry partners has been critical.
“All parts of the project are important and when you design an overall system like this it is actually crucial to have people with very different skills to collaborate – coding and modulation are very different to antennae design – so we’ve needed to put all our skills together to come up with the overall system,” he said.
“Most of what UniSA is doing is computer simulation, which allows us to design the system without the real hardware in mathematical models and play with the way the signals operate so we can measure the performance.
“The team at Macquarie is doing most of the integrated circuit design and Adelaide University’s role includes the antenna design.”
Prof Cowley acknowledges Dr Neil Weste, through his company NHEW R&D, as the commercial sponsor for the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded linkage project.
“During the past decade Neil had a key role in the development of the wireless local area network (LAN) standards that are commonly used at present. Now the GLIMMR project is trying to repeat these successes using a frequency band ten times higher than the current technology,” he said.
Prof Cowley says the next move is to build a “proof of concept” demonstrator which will take the technology another step closer to commercialisation.
“The demand for broadband mobile communications is growing so rapidly there’s no doubt in my mind that this type of technology will become widely used. It will be exciting to see how it unfolds,” he said.
For more information go to the GLIMMR Project URL: http://www.elec.mq.edu.au/glimmr/
Contacts for interview
- Dr Bill Cowley office (08) 8302 3858 mobile 0412 459 846 email bill.cowley@unisa.edu.au
Media contact
-
Linda Hein office (08) 8302 0965 mobile 0411 257 029
email linda.hein@unisa.edu.au