Monthly Archives: September 2014

Speaker: Nobby Stevens and Bart Thoen

Company/ Institute: KU Leuven – KAHo Sint-Lieven

Event: 16th work meeting

Date: 16 October

Abstract:

Wireless power systems based on inductive coupling gained significance over the past years. As a consequence, standards and regulations were developed, such as the Qi-standard of the wireless power consortium and Rezence from the alliance for wireless power. All these commercial systems are designed for stationary charging devices with batteries, like smartphones and tablets. Communication is required for device detection and power regulation. The Qi-standard uses one way communication from the power receiver to the power transmitter. This is achieved by modulating the inductive link using load modulation. The Rezence standard on the other hand uses a two way Bluetooth connection. Because all these systems are designed with a stationary battery powered receiver as boundary condition, none of these is suitable to power a constantly moving device. This is due to the long time it takes to activate the power transmitter when the power receiver is detected. For this kind of systems, a new and dedicated communication and power transfer system has been developed. Were have implemented this protocol in the representative example of a wireless computer mouse. The wireless mouse that we have chosen is the M705 wireless mouse from Logitech, which is normally powered by two AA-batteries. The available amount of space for the receiver circuitry is created by removing the two AA-batteries. The average power consumption of the mouse under normal working load is 10 mW. With the choice of dedicated components and the implementation of the new communication protocol, presence of the receiver for less than 12~s above the transmitter guarantees autonomous functionality for more than 15 minutes. Remark that these 12 s must not be contiguous, short presence for less than half a second is sufficient to load the on-board energy buffer.

Slides: click here to download (Community members only, login required)

Speaker: Kris Hermus

Company/ Institute: imec

Event: 16th work meeting

Date: 16 October 2014

Abstract:

In this short introduction we give a status update of the Wireless Community, and we invite three of our newest members –  AboveRF, Quicksand and snapTonic – to pitch their expertise in wireless technology.

Slides: click here to download the intro slides (Community members only, login required).

Also download the slides from AboveRF, Quicksand, and snapTonic.

Speaker: Hantao Xu (promotor: Prof. Guy Vandenbosch)

Company/ Institute: KU Leuven – ESAT

Event: 16th work meeting

Date: 16 October

Abstract:

For decades scientists and engineers have been performing abundant research on multiple antenna systems. In many modern wireless systems, multiple antenna technology is proposed to improve system performance, for example involving coverage and capacity. However, there is a brick wall lying between the well-established theoretical work and prototyping on the one hand, and the commercial application of multiple antenna technology in wireless communication systems on the other hand.

In the antenna group of ESAT-TELEMIC, KU Leuven, as part of the scientific community we carry out investigations on theoretical issues such as beamforming, direction finding, etc., but on top we also build functioning prototypes as test platforms for real life applications. Not only the performance of an algorithm is investigated, but also the complexity of the algorithm, related to a suitable electronic architecture, and its actual implementation. Several practical systems have been designed and manufactured, including analog and digital beamforming arrays, ranging from a simple 2 elements array to a fully digital 16 elements arrays for multi user tracking. In this presentation, an overview of these prototypes and their functionalities will be given.

Slides: click here to download (Community members only, login required)

Speaker: Steven Brebels

Company/ Institute: imec

Event: 16th work meeting

Date: 16 October

Abstract:

available soon

Slides: click here to download (Community members only, login required)

Speaker: Laurena Lau, Transceive, NL (presenter), Sander Bronckers, TU/e, NL (presenter) and Koen Van Caekenberghe, ChipDesign, BE

Company/ Institute: ChipDesign

Event: 16th work meeting

Date: 16 October

Abstract:

The design of antennas for mobile devices is becoming increasingly challenging. New wireless standards, touting enhanced throughput, require both the coverage of more frequency bands per antenna (to support LTE-A inter-band carrier aggregation for example), as well as more antennas per mobile device (to support IEEE802.11ac or LTE-A MIMO for example). At the same time, mobile devices become sleeker. The Chu-Harrington limit, however, bounds and relates the bandwidth, the efficiency and the volume of electrically small antennas. ChipDesign has therefore developed a multi-functional tunable antenna, which allows multi-band 2G/3G/4G cellular communication, 866 MHz RFID tag reading, L-band DVB-H and S-band SDARS broadcast reception, L2 GPS navigation and 2.45 GHz WLAN (IEEE802.11a/b/g/n/ac) and WPAN (Bluetooth and ZigBee) connectivity. ChipDesign believes that its on-demand-reconfigurable multi-functional antenna paradigm can provide a solution to the MIMO-on-the-handset conundrum.

Slides: click here to download (Community members only, login required)

Speaker: Hendrik Rogier and Patrick Van Torre

Company/ Institute: UGent

Event: 16th work meeting

Date: 16 October

Abstract:

A distributed on-body network, incorporating multiple autonomous wireless sensor nodes was designed and implemented.
The sensor nodes are integrated onto a dual-polarized textile antenna platform and allow polarization diversity by means of selection combining.
Synchronous data acquisition is performed on each wireless unit, transmitting the data in real time to a base station.
Each body-worn node is also actively forwarding packets from all other nodes, significantly increasing the reliability as well as the range of the communication.
The system is fully autonomous, very compact, low-cost and flexible, enabling unobtrusive integration into rescue-worker garment.

A demonstration of the wireless sensor system displays the real-time wireless transmission of 3-axis accelerometer data and their direct graphical visualization.
The cooperation of several wireless sensor nodes is also included, graphically
displaying sensor data from all nodes in real-time and illustrating packet
forwarding.

Slides: click here to download (Community members only, login required)