MUNICH, Germany — A Berlin company showed a novel wireless modulation scheme here that's said to be far more efficient than Bluetooth, Zigbee or WiFi in terms of bandwidth, transmission power, data rate and cost. Nanotron Technologies GmbH, a 10-year-old research company that recently became a fabless chip maker, is pitching the proprietary RF system as a fundamentally different physical-layer (PHY) technology that ultimately could compete against ultrawideband technologies.
Nanotron's Multiple Dimension Mutiple Access (MDMA) scheme, which got its first public airing at the Electronica trade show, which began Tuesday (Nov. 12), operates in the license-free 2.4-GHz ISM band. MDMA uses multiple modulation techniques — not just one, like conventional wireless technology — including AM, FM and phase modulation.
"We are taking well-known principles you can find in every elementary wireless-technology textbook," said Manfred Koslar, chief executive officer at Nanotron. The transmission system, which he termed extremely reliable, can be built using surprisingly simple transceivers and receivers, he added.
Nanotron's RF transceiver chip, scheduled for sampling in March, offers a 2-Mbit/second data rate over a 700-meter range outdoors and 60-meter range indoors, on 10 milliwatts of power.
MDMA technology, in principle, "can scale on the fly" up to 128 Mbits/s, claimed Hubertus von Janecek, director of sales at Nanotron. Because MDMA requires no need for synchronization in time or in frequency, it saves both energy and time. In addition, having no need for error correction means obviating a DSP — and, thus, cost savings, von Janecek added. Nanotron demonstrated the MDMA technology at the show here using discrete components.
Initially, the RF transceiver chip was fabricated using Atmel's 0.35-micron silicon germanium process, but Nanotron expects to move to an all-CMOS process, von Janecek said. The transceiver will integrate PHY and media-access control in one chip with an SPI interface to a low-cost 8-bit microcontroller. Only 4 Mbytes of ROM is necessary to store both MAC and dynamic link-layer codes, while 256 bytes of RAM is sufficient to run MDMA.
Additional components necessary for the MDMA-based ultralow-power transceiver are an ISM-band antenna, a SAW filter that is supplied with the chip and software protocol stacks. The chip will be priced at "less than $10" in 10,000 units, von Janecek said. An evaluation kit is due in May.
