Start up claims digital communications breakthrough

The company is MagnaCom and its technology is WAM (WAve Modulation), a digital modulation technique that offers system gain advantage of 10dB over the industry standard QAM modulation used in virtually all wired and wireless products. "What we have is a technology that will be as big a shift as upgrading analogue to digital TV," said Yossi Cohen, co-founder and ceo of MagnaCom. "Our technology is a replacement for QAM, but we are offering a huge improvement. Most improvements gain 0.5dB or at most 1dB – 10dB represents a 20 year step forward." MagnaCom claims that WAM offers up to 400% longer distance with an equivalent connection quality, 50% power savings, 50% spectrum savings, lower cost, better noise tolerance and faster speed. WAM is available for licence as an IP block. The technology uses the same analogue and rf circuits as QAM, requiring no analogue or mixed-signal re-design and is a pure digital modulation scheme. WAM technology may consume less than 1 square millimeter in semiconductor design, but because of its scalability it allows designers to implement smaller, lower cost solution for a lesser benefit. WAM technology uses spectral compression which improves spectral efficiency. The spectral compression enables an increase of the signalling rate (e.g. by 2x) thereby affording the use of lower order alphabet (e.g. a 64 constellation alphabet instead of 4096), which reduces complexity. It provides inherent diversity of time and frequency domains and uses nonlinear signal shaping and adaptive nonlinear model learning. The nonlinearities are handled digitally at the receiver side, allowing a lower-cost and lower-power transmitter design.