At the heart of all wireless communications lies an antenna, or in the case of today’s mobile phones and laptops that need to receive Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, EVDO, WiMax or DVB-H, sometimes two or three. Packing each of these antennas into a small form factor is expensive and can cause interference problems, so when I saw that SkyCross, an antenna company in Viera, Fla., had managed to receive several signals on one antenna, I thought that was pretty sweet.
The company, which was spun off from BAE Systems in 2002 and has raised at least $36.5 million in venture capital from TL Ventures, Intel Capital and SK Telecom, discovered a way to use multiple feed points on one antenna by accident. The result: one antenna that acts like three or four. SkyCross calls it “isolated mode antenna technology,” or iMAT. Instead of two antennas, a SkyCross antenna user gets one antenna with two ports for each frequency. Theoretically one could have an infinite number of antennas, notes Paul Tornatta, managing director with SkyCross, but right now the practical limit is three or four.
Efficient antennas require less effort to “talk” to a base station, so the proliferation of iMAT antennas could improve network operations while also sucking less juice from a device’s battery. SkyCross antennas are already in USB dongles and data cards, will soon be found in certain cell-phone handsets and eventually, in laptops and router cards.
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4 trackbacks so far
5:29 PM PT
[...] February 4, 2008Unlimited wireless services from a single antenna? Maybe Quite possibly, but right now 4 is considered a breakthrough if it works. Even if the transmission is digital, radio waves themselves are by nature analog, and efficient antennas are dimensionally tuned to the wavelength of the signal. Enable a bunch of wavelengths in a single device and you consume a bunch of space with antennas, until now. At the heart of all wireless communications lies an antenna, or in the case of today’s mobile phones and laptops that need to receive Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, EVDO, WiMax or DVB-H, sometimes two or three. Packing each of these antennas into a small form factor is expensive and can cause interference problems, so when I saw that SkyCross, an antenna company in Viera, Fla., had managed to receive several signals on one antenna, I thought that was pretty sweet. (from GigaOm) [...]
9:24 PM PT
[...] [via gigaom] [...]
4:36 AM PT
[...] iMAT [...]
11:00 AM PT
[...] from televisions to DVD players to camcorders, expect a CMOS innovation or a breakthrough in antennas. Share/Send Sphere Print Previous [...]
3 comments so far
10:42 AM PT
It’s funny: mutliband antennas are all over the place in mobile commercial applications, commercial rooftop sites (Duplexors and triplexors), multi band di-poles and tripoles, etc.
What took ‘em so long to get the three bands into a compact embedded consumer application?
1:08 PM PT
Alan, if you were to take those outdoor multiband antennae apart, you would notice that underneath the radome is actually multiple discrete antennae, not a single multiband antenna.
7:49 PM PT
Is there a way to create firmware for a multi-band/multi-antennae short-haul wireless chip that receives instructions and creates a protocol for communication on the fly? Something that can communicate under the guidelines of WiFi, Bluetooth, UWB, WirelessHD, whatever but the specs are not set in stone with some pre-existing standard? What if the applications that use the chip were to give a set of instructions to the chip on the fly and the chip would then use its multi-band/multi-antennae functionality to figure out how to best send/receive data depending on the short-haul application/bandwidth-intensity, etc. With a second layer of software, that may cause the chip to run up battery.
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