Anatech Electronics February 2021 Newsletter

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Sam Benzacar of Anatech Electronics, an RF and microwave filter company, has published his January newsletter that features his short op−ed entitled "What 5G Phase 2 Has in Store." He points out that as the Internet and cellphone service overlap, there is less and less of a distinction between the two. "When you pore through the information about Release 16, it becomes obvious that the domains of 'cellular' and IoT will blend to become a single diverse communications environment comprehensive enough to serve consumer, industrial, automotive, agricultural, scientific, and other applications. Today, short-range communication standards such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Thread are used at the edge of the network but Release 16 will allow cellular to either complement or even replace them eventually." Sam also presents some relevant industry news items as well.

Now that 5G is on the way to deployment, the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) is moving on to Release 16, "5G Phase 2." The new standard covers an enormous amount of ground, from enhanced coverage and capacity to lower latency, power consumption, higher reliability, easier deployment, and many other issues. Taken together, they should make it possible to realize the applications that will drive 5G for many years.

When you pore through the information about Release 16, it becomes obvious that the domains of "cellular" and IoT will blend to become a single diverse communications environment comprehensive enough to serve consumer, industrial, automotive, agricultural, scientific, and other applications. Today, short-range communication standards such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Thread are used at the edge of the network but Release 16 will allow cellular to either complement or even replace them eventually. They will play an even less important role in autonomous vehicles once they arrive on the scene.

Release 16 will fully enable all region of the spectrum, focusing on better use of unlicensed bands in which spectrum sharing is used, such as Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) in which both licensed and unlicensed entities share spectrum with existing users, as well as the new allocations at 6 GHz. The standard will also concentrate on increasing power amplifier efficiency that is crucial for IoT applications in which sensors and other devices operate from a battery.

For the first time it should be possible to provide location services in three axes that is crucial for public safety services and has eluded many previous efforts. By combining GPS with cellular-based positioning, Release 16 should allow location accuracy possibly as low as 3 m and even below 1 m with IoT applications.

To address autonomous vehicles, public safety, and other applications, Release 16 will increase the use of a side link that allows coordinated sensors sharing as well as higher throughput and lower latency. A variety of new capabilities will increase reliability potentially up to 99.9% and reduce latency in some applications below 1 ms over short hops. This is achieved by a technology called coordinated multipoint (CoMP) that uses multiple transmission and reception points to create spatial diversity and redundant communication paths.

These are just a few of the capabilities that will soon be integrated within smartphones, laptops, tablets, and numerous IoT devices. The first Release 16-compliant chipsets have already been announced, which means they should be finding their way into various devices sometime next year

Army Develops Quantum Receiver With DC-to 20 GHz Bandwidth - RF Cafe

The Army Research Laboratory has developed a quantum spectrum analyzer that has an instantaneous bandwidth of DC to 20 GHz. It is based on a Rydberg sensor that uses laser beams to create Rydberg atoms directly above a microwave circuit. As the Rydberg atoms react to the circuit's voltage, the device can be used as a sensitive probe. The device was announced in Physical Review Applied in the paper "Waveguide-coupled Rydberg spectrum analyzer from 0 to 20 GHz" co-authored by Army researchers David Meyer, Paul Kunz, and Kevin Cox. One of next steps will be to better understand how to improve performance as the sensor size is decreased.

C-band Auction Nets Nearly $81B - RF Cafe

The C-band auction that closed on January 15 was the highest-grossing auction ever held by the FCC, with gross proceeds of about $81 billion, passing over the previous record was of $44.9 billion from the AWS-3 auction in 2015. This auction offered a total of 280 MHz of 30.7 and 3.98 GHz. In this first phase, bidders won generic blocks of spectrum, while the assignment phase that began on February 8 lets them choose for their preferred license assignments. The biggest bidders, presumably Verizon and AT&T, received much need mid-band spectrum for 5G, while the much-touted Citizens Broadband Radio Services (CBRS) auction last summer raised only $4.5 billion.

Technique Lets 28-GHz Signals Pass Through Windows - RF Cafe

A major impediment to use of millimeter-wave frequencies for 5G is the inability of signals at these frequencies to penetrate windows. To remedy this, Japan's NTT DoCoMo has developed a film-like metasurface lens that can be attached to window surfaces that it claims can guide 28-GHz radio signals received from outdoors to specific locations indoors. The lens is made from a material that has many sub-wavelength unit cells arranged periodically on a two-dimensional surface in a way that signals from outdoors can be received on a window's broad surface and then propagated to specific focal points inside a building because in a manner that directs signals to specific focal points indoors with the help of repeaters and reflectors. The transparent film can cover the entire inside surface of a window and was designed to be "aesthetically acceptable". The film does not affect sub-6 GHz signals, so it should not affect the performance of legacy wireless frequencies.

The collapse of the Arecibo Telescope last year after being damaged by Hurricane Maria deprived radio astronomy of a primary observational tool, but a team at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is upgrading an existing telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to partially replace it while providing more precise images of near-Earth objects. The Green Bank Telescope is already the world's largest completely steerable radio telescope, but to reach near the levels of Arecibo's 300-m observing surface, the 100-m Green Bank telescope requires some major modifications. They are being performed by NRAO and Raytheon and will increase the radiated power of the telescope to about 500 KW, allowing astronomers to bounce radar signals off objects as far as Uranus and Neptune.

Anatech Electronics introduce New Ka band 30.5 GHz Waveguide Band Pass Filter. Featuring a center frequency of 30.5 GHz, a bandwidth of 1000 MHz, an Insertion Loss 1 dB Max, and a Power Handling is 20 watts.

Anatech Electronics Introduces a New Line of Suspended Stripline and Waveguide Type RF Filters

Anatech Electronics, Inc. (AEI) specializes in the design and manufacture of standard and custom RF and microwave filters and other passive components and subsystems employed in commercial, industrial, and aerospace and applications. Products are available from an operating frequency range of 10 kHz to 30 GHz and include cavity, ceramic, crystal, LC, and surface acoustic wave (SAW), as well as power combiners/dividers, duplexers and diplexers, directional couplers, terminations, attenuators, circulators, EMI filters, and lightning arrestors. The company's custom products and capabilities are available at www.anatechelectronics.com.