Millimetric radio may speed data transfer

Researchers at UniSA’s Institute for Telecommunications Research (ITR), in partnership with Macquarie and Adelaide Universities, claim to have proved the viability of an untapped radio frequency band that will increase the speed and capacity of data transfer to wireless devices such as laptops and iPods and potentially between a home DVD player and high-definition TV.

A prototype chip has been developed as part of the GLIMMR (gigabit low-cost integrated millimetre-wave radio) project that uses the ‘millimetre-wave technology’, which is a new frontier in electronic communications according to UniSA Prof of Communication and Signal Processing Bill Cowley.

“Every time we make a wireless connection, we’re using the radio spectrum, and basically we’re running out of spectrum due to such high uptake of wireless technologies,” Cowley said.

“People increasingly want to watch video media on devices like laptops or iPods, so these applications need to move large quantities of data in a relatively small time, which is where the millimetre-wave technology comes in.

“One way to achieve very high data rates is to use millimetre spectrum.”

“The chip 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,” Cowley 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 an HD TV — with no wires or cables.”

While the ITR team has focused on modem design, system simulation and chip testing to produce a realistic model of how the final system will perform, Cowley said 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 antenna design — so we’ve needed to put all our skills together to come up with the overall system,” Cowley said.

“Most of what UniSA is doing is computer simulation that 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.”

Cowley says the next move is to build a proof-of-concept demonstrator which will take the technology another step closer to commercialisation.