Imec announces reconfigurable radio solutions for spectrum sensing
Imec has introduced a new digital front end component for low cost and low power spectrum sensing, a move it claims will pave the way for power efficient cognitive radios and networks.
While traditional radio architectures focus on the reception of a predefined channel and are usually unable to proceed to a frequency scan operation in a cost and energy efficient way, the new spectrum sensing component is designed as a versatile digital engine to meet a variety of use cases at low cost and low power overhead.
According to the company, the chip can perform both flexible synchronisation and spectrum sensing for high throughput WLAN (802.11a-n), cellular standards (including the recent 3GPP-LTE) and digital broadcasting standards. The unit hosts a dedicated ASIP and connects to the company's own analogue reconfigurable radio chip (SCALDIO) and programmable digital baseband platform (COBRA). Imec claims its complete reconfigurable radio solutions enable multimode communication with efficient use of the spectrum.
