Kumu Networks announced immediate commercial availability of an evaluation board for its KU1500 Canceller RFIC. The KU1500 is a component in Kumu Networks’ Self-Interference Cancellation portfolio. It is able to suppress the noise a transmitter makes in its own receiver or nearby receivers, allowing full-duplex operation or co-existence of radios in the same band. In addition to Self-Interference Cancelation for communications applications, the new chip is ideal for applications requiring signal processing in the analog domain such as adaptive filtering and equalization for RF communications, high-end audio applications, industrial and automotive sensors and medical imaging systems.

Kumu Networks will showcase the KU1500 at the upcoming International Microwave Symposium (IMS2019) event held in Boston on June 2-7. Live demonstration of the new RFIC will be available in the Startup Pavilion at the event.  In addition, Kumu Networks executive will participate in the panel titled “In-Band Full-Duplex: Is It Really Going To Happen?” and will deliver one of the sessions in the “In Band Full Duplex Technologies and Applications” workshop.

Frequency bands are divided into channels. A radio transmitting on a channel within a band is negatively affecting the performance of a receiver attempting to operate elsewhere within the same band. This is a common problem affecting consumers daily. Examples include:

• WiFi-WiFi interference: Dual-5GHz access points always separate one radio to the lower 5 GHz band (UNII-1 and UNII-2a) while forcing the other radio to operate in the upper 5 GHz band (UNII-2c and UNII-3), limiting channel selection and the ability to avoid interference from neighboring APs.
• WiFi-Bluetooth interference: Devices that simultaneously use WiFi 2.4GHz and Bluetooth audio streaming limit the Bluetooth range while reducing Wi-Fi speeds to absolute minimum in order to cope with the inevitable interference between the radios.
• BT-BT interference: Bluetooth Mesh standard that was introduced in 2017 stopped short of defining a mesh solution for audio streaming, preventing Bluetooth Mesh Extenders for a whole-home network. This is simply because two BT radios operating simultaneously in the 2.4 GHz would interfere, which would make audio streaming impossible.
• 5G-5G: Unless synchronized, two 5G TDD radios operating, for example, in the 3.5 GHz, even if they belong to two different operators, would interfere with each other. This is why in China all TDD networks are synchronized. This negatively affects the utilization of the network as TDD ratio cannot be independently set by service providers and private network operators.

Kumu Networks’ Self-Interference Cancelation technology embedded in the KU1500 and its tuning logic, is designed to address these and many other similar problems currently affecting consumers, enterprises, operators and government networks.

“The KU1500 offers relief for some of today’s most difficult wireless engineering problems,” said Kumu Networks CEO David Cutrer. “With wireless networks growing ever denser, and radio types and frequencies multiplying, self-interference cancellation is becoming a critical factor in allowing device manufacturers and network operators to deliver the performance and functionality that consumers expect.”

The KU1500 is the world’s first canceller implementation on a chip. Thanks to its unique analog design, the KU1500 has no processing latency–just the time it takes for electrons to traverse the circuit. It packs as much as 700 nanoseconds of delay-spread to handle strong reflections that affect the self-interference channel.

The evaluation board for the KU1500 Analog FIR Filter IC is now available. While the KU1500 itself is frequency-agnostic, the evaluation board supports frequencies from 500 MHz to 6 GHz. It measures 2.75 in. x 3.5 in. and offers a simple RF interfaces through MCX connectors to connect to the front-end of radios. The control interface of the board is through a USB connector and a simple API.