Dear Sir/Madam

More and more electronic devices are portable and demand for wireless communication. This newsletter shows a few examples of this ongoing trend. Enjoy!

Wolfgang Patelay
Technical Editor, EPN

At Glance, in this issue

1. Products News 2. Articles 3. Design Tips 4. Market Research 5. Book of the Month

1| Product News

Wi-Fi Internet Radio (Cambridge Consultants)
Based on just two ICs, the Iona Wi-Fi portable radio can be built with an electronic bill-of-materials (eBOM) of less than $15. Designed to operate without a PC, the Iona radio technology is as accessible and easy to use as today's portable FM radios, only requiring a Wi-Fi Internet connection.
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Programmable Radio IC (Cypress)
Conceived as a programmable radio-system-on-a-chip (ProC), the ProC LP integrates a robust WirelessUSB LP 2.4GHz transceiver with a low-cost enCoRe II 8-bit Flash microcontroller. PRoC LP simplifies coding and board layout to cut design time and reduce board-space requirements for small-form-factor wireless human-interface devices such as mice, presenter tools and RF remote controls.
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Baseband Analyser (Rohde & Schwarz)
With a frequency range up to 36MHz, the R&S FMU36 base band analyser performs the measurement ahead of the RF signal and measures the I/Q signals in the baseband. Spectrum and vector-signal analysis for WLAN or 3GPP FDD, for example, can be performed by means of probes directly on the DUT's printed board, if necessary.
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Mobile-Application Processors (Marvell)
The Marvell PXA 3xx product family is completely software-compatible and includes two pin-compatible components specifically tailored to high-volume consumer products such as mobile phones, digital media players, GPS navigation systems, and embedded devices. The Marvell PXA300 (Monahans-L) offers performance and cost optimisation for high-volume hand-held devices, while the Marvell PXA 310 (Monahan-LV) provides highresolution VGA multimedia performance with extended battery life for demanding 3G video and audio use.
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2| Articles

Ultra-Low-Power Wireless Body Monitoring
With over 70% of health-budget expenditure on chronic disease, the need for low-cost patient monitoring has never been higher. Pro-active monitoring of at-risk patients enables more effective treatments and delivers improved quality of care. Today's telecare systems, however, are typically bulky, wired and power-intensive, and represent an inappropriate solution to long-term health monitoring. Current monitoring systems not only adversely impact the patient's quality of life but also fail to deliver continuous monitoring. The article by Keith Errey from Toumaz Technology shows a solution of this problem.
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RF Front End Takes Advantage of CMOS
The linearity, power handling, ruggedness and small-signal performance demanded by today's advanced RF devices was unobtainable 10 years ago. But the industry is by no means resting on its laurels. Mobile handset designers for GSM and WCDMA are already demonstrating so-called "candy bar" sized slim phones. Rodd Novak from Peregrine Semiconductor describes in his article that this trend demands also slimmer and smaller devices.
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3| Design tips

Magnetic-field probe requires few components
Popularly known as “gauss meters,” various makes and models of magnetic field meters are available on the market at prices that make them unaffordable to most people. This Design Idea by Rama Sarma, EMI-EMC Centre, RCI, Hyderabad, India, combines a commonly available DMM (digital multimeter) with a single semiconductor component to measure magnetic-flux density and, in turn, magnetic-field intensity.
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Microprocessor generates programmable clock sequences
To produce trains of pulses suitable for keying transmitters, testing circuits, and debugging data links, designers requiring continuous or event-driven pulse sequences have traditionally relied on pulse generators or collections of simple circuits. Today's inexpensive microprocessors make it possible to design and build low-cost, dedicated pulse-sequence generators with a minimum of resources. In a small, SOT-23-packaged, 10F200 controller from Microchip, the design in the Design Idea by William Grill from Honeywell BRGA uses a code-based embedded table algorithm to generate an application-settable period and table-based PWM (pulse-width-modulation) sequence.
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4| Market Research

The “Portable World” Driving Strong Growth in Portable Electronics
As more digital content becomes available, consumers demand new and improved ways to access this content via wired and wireless technologies, reports In-Stat (http://www.in-stat.com). And, in an increasingly portable world, consumers are demanding ways in which to take their digital content with them wherever they go. As a result, portable products are an increasingly popular part of the consumer electronics (CE) market.
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5| Book of the Month

MIMO Wireless Communications, by Claude Oestges and Bruno Clerckx
Uniquely, this book proposes robust space-time code designs for real-world wireless channels. Through a unified framework, it emphasizes how propagation mechanisms such as space-time frequency correlations and coherent components impact the MIMO system performance under realistic power constraints. Combining a solid mathematical analysis with a physical and intuitive approach to space-time coding, the book progressively derives innovative designs, taking into consideration that MIMO channels are often far from ideal.
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