Swarms of drones with limited resources can effectively search an environment, according to the Technical University of Delft, which has invented an algorithm to make it all work – without guidance from a central computer. The overall aim of the project was for a group of small robots to spread out autonomously after they are released, video as much of an ...
Communications
170GHz test bed for 6G research
Test gear maker National Instruments systems has announced a 110-170GHz software-defined radio for 6G comms research, built on NI’s existing mmWave Transceiver System (MTS) and Virginia Diodes’ (VDI) radio heads. MTS has modular base-band and IF components that can be combined with programmable logic (FPGAs) to build complex RF transceiver – such as MIMO systems with digital signal processing capabilities. ...
Japanese lab demonstrates 1Pbit/s data switching
The Japanese National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT) has developed and demonstrated the first large-scale optical switching test bed capable of handling one petabit per second optical signals – that is 1015bit/s and “equivalent to the capacity to send 8K video to 10 million people simultaneously”, according to the lab. Low-loss MEMS optical switches were used, alongside three ...
DSP Group and Chirp produce design for ultrasonic data transmission
Chirp and DSP Group have announced the Chirp SDK reference design for sound-based data transmission. The design kit combines Chirp’s ultrasonic signaling protocol for smart-enabled devices with DSP Group’s Smartvoice technology to allow connectivity between nearby devices without set up, pairing, or configuration. Chirp’s ultrasonic machine-to-machine communications software enables any device with a loudspeaker or microphone to exchange data using ...
Adesto and Cadence collaborate on xSPI ecosystem for IoT devices
Adesto Technologies Corporation and Cadence Design Systems have announced a collaboration to expand the ecosystem around the expanded serial peripheral interface (xSPI) communication protocol to enable higher transfer rates and lower latency for flash memory in IoT devices. The Cadence memory model for xSPI enables use of the octal NOR flash with the host processor in an xSPI system, including ...
Microchip simplifies proper security for small product runs
Microchip is offering high security IoT authentication to companies with no prior security knowledge, that are producing as few as 10 units. Authentication, in this case, is proving the identity of a device attempting to connect across a network using asymmetric cryptography. Called ‘Trust Platform’, this is a ‘pre-provisioned’ hardware-based secure key storage system, which also offers solutions for mid and ...
Bacteria grows tellurium non-linear optical structures
Bacteria can grow optically-active tellurium nano-rods, according to the University of Houston. Optoelectronic and photonic devices could benefit. The current discovery grew out of 30 years of basic research, stemming from an initial discovery of selenite-respiring bacteria that form discrete packets of elemental selenium. “From there, it was a step down the periodic table to learn that the same could ...
Atomic demodulator works at 19GHz
Researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have used atoms to decode digital signals encoded by phase modulation. The atoms, cesium in this case, are ‘Rydberg atoms’ – atoms that have been wound up into a high energy state that is extremely sensitive to electric and magnetic fields. In this case the atoms were in a vapour cell, pushed ...
Cellular IoT prototyping platform includes GNSS and works near-globally
Thingy:91 is a cellular and GNSS IoT prototyping platform with world-wide coverage across 700MHz to 2200MHz, created by Nordic Semiconductor and Fractus Antennas. Based on Nordic’s nRF9160 SiP multimode LTE-M/NB-IoT system-in-package with GPS, the battery-powered Thingy:91 comes with a roaming SIM card, 16 sensors and a nRF52840 for short-range wireless communication with Bluetooth 5, Thread, Zigbee and ANT. The SIM is a Nano ...
‘Cloud kit’ links sensors to Amazon for secure IoT
The Renesas RX65N Cloud Kit is aimed at those prototyping sensor-based IoT end-points with secure links to the cloud
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