Articles by David Vye

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Home entertainment electronics are finding their way into new vehicles, merging with car-specific functions such as navigation, hands-free phone control, and telematics. "Infotainment" as the technology has been termed, describes the complete ecosystem of electronic devices for automobile-based information and entertainment. Audio and video devices, as well as navigation systems and telematics, are merging into single, fully-integrated systems, creating new challenges for system designers. Much of the responsibility for the quality of the infotainment system rests with the designers of in-car radio. Thanks to technological breakthroughs in integrated circuits, filters, amplifiers, and antenna designs, sound quality has improved with each...

De-Kun Li's new epidemiological study shows that extended exposure to weak magnetic fields as low as 1.6 mG (0.16 µT) can have negative effects on sperm quality, so says the results of a report published by Reproductive Toxicology. "This is the first demonstration of a link between EMF exposure and the decline of semen quality," Li told Microwave News. The study, which was carried out in Shanghai, has important implications for overall fertility because approximately 40% of the Shanghai population is exposed to more than 1.6 mG for 2.4 hours on a daily basis. The study, a collaboration with Chinese...

When the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Iraqi insurgents have been intercepting video communication signals from United States Predator drones over the last year, they characterized the actions as “the emergence of a shadow cyber war within the U.S.-led conflicts overseas.” The truth is that cyber war has been the fifth warfare domain for some time, a new theater of war teeming with invisible enemies. The frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks is increasing daily, driven home by the insurgents’ wherewithal to both know that a $26 piece of pirating software could intercept these video signals (the Pentagon...

The results of a survey by a trade journal serving the Integrated Circuit market on “How Designers Search – Survey Results.” offered some interesting food for thought. The information was gleaned from the 185 managers, engineers and programmers working in commercial or military sectors out of 443 respondents to a survey sent to eg3.com’s 43,000-plus subscriber list. The survey attempted to determine how engineers and programmers search for information on technology, what types of content they were seeking, and how they went about finding it. As might be expected, search engines ranked high and were used by engineers, virtually all...

Some impressive milestones in the world of Microwave semiconductors were noted this week. Here's a glimpse of some of the noteable announcements RFMD announced the receipt of its first purchase order from a tier-one wireless base station original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for a product featuring RFMD's state-of-the-art gallium nitride (GaN) process technology. The purchase order is for RFMD's RFG1M09180 180 W GaN broadband power transistor (BPT) and is in support of the global expansion of 4G wireless networks. NXP Semiconductor touted their ranking at the top of the latest Vendor Matrix released by ABI Research. The Strategy Analytics RF &...

The list below came to me in an e-mail. The popularity of smart phones will hopefully continue and many of these soon-to-be released products will enjoy robust sales, translating into good earnings for component vendors. Media-rich phones also require more bandwidth capacity on the inforstructure-side, so strong smart phone sales will benefit many in the microwave field. 1. Motorola Droid (Verizon Wireless) - The most anticipated cell phone launch of the season is just days away, but the hype for this the Motorola Droid smartphone has been building for quite some time. Verizon Wireless has invested heavily in a national...

This week CEL released the new MeshConnect™ Extended Range module, which offers +20 dBm output power, extended the range of operation to over two miles. The power boost also provides more reliable transmission and allows fewer nodes in the network. It is especially useful for open outdoor applications where the nodes are physically far apart, or for indoor use where the nodes have to connect in a noisy RF environment. The Extended Range Module’s outstanding +123.5 dB link budget ensures high quality connections even in such harsh environments. For both the original Module and the new Extended Range Module,...

This came across my desk and I thought it was worth sharing - Chris Whiteley, director of business development for xG® Technology, will be one of the presenters at the COMPTEL Conference next week in Orlando, Florida. COMPTEL members are entrepreneurial companies building and deploying next-generation networks to provide competitive voice, data, and video services. Whiteley will be on the Monday afternoon panel examining “Emerging Technologies.” He will present information on xMax®--the world’s first mobile VoIP network, which allows consumers to benefit from much lower-cost mobile calls via the Internet. xG Technology developed xMax as an alternative solution that enables...

Fertility researcher, John Aitken, is advising men wishing to have children to avoid keeping their active mobile phones below the waist. His research group at the University of Newcastle in Australia has found that human sperm exposed to mobile phone radiation (1.8 GHz) for 16 hours had reduced vitality and motility, two key indices of fertility. Notably, he has also confirmed his own previous study, published in 2005, which showed that RF radiation could lead to DNA damage. In that earlier experiment, he had exposed mice to 900 MHz signals and then looked at the animals' sperm, in contrast to...