facebook rss twitter

OMRON develops first commercial Ultra-Wideband MIMO antenna for HD

Quick Link: HEXUS.net/qagu5

Add to My Vault: x


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 25, 2006

OMRON Develops World’s First Commercial Ultra-Wideband (UWB) MIMO Antenna for High-Definition Video Transmission

Provides antenna for Tzero’s UltraMIMO™ UWB solution

Optimized to deliver an unrivaled, standards-based, telecast quality, consumer experience

TOKYO, Japan - OMRON Corporation (TSE: 6645, US: OMRNY), a global leader in electronic components, sensing and control technologies, announced that it will release the world’s first commercial polymer antenna for Ultra-Wideband (UWB communications - see note 1) targeted toward high-definition (HD) and other telecast quality video transmission applications. Shipping in mass production volume to High Definition television (HDTV) as well as related DVD and projector equipment manufacturers is scheduled to start in spring 2007. The new antenna will be unveiled for preview at OMRON’s booth in the CEATEC JAPAN 2006 exhibition to be held at Makuhari Messe, near Tokyo, October 3-7, 2006.

OMRON’s latest UWB antenna addresses a clear market need as growing numbers of consumers worldwide upgrade to enjoy the superior HD viewing experience. HDTVs and related DVD players and scalers equipped with this antenna enable consumers to experience telecast quality HD video in their homes, while eliminating the cost and inconvenience of unsightly cables and wires.

Viewing HD content wirelessly requires stable and reliable video transmission. Multiple Input, Multiple Output (MIMO - see note 2) wireless technology that optimizes chipset design with antenna, to prevent typical jitters and flickers, can provide this reliability.

In particular, demand has been increasing from HDTV ODMs and OEMs for a high-performance antenna optimized with the UltraMIMO technology (see note 3) developed by Silicon Valley-based Tzero Technologies, a leading provider of UWB chipsets for high-quality, wireless, video transmission.

Now, in a world-first, OMRON has met this need with a polymer antenna that maintains flatness in gain and omni directivity (see note 4) within standards-based UWB guidelines.

“The antenna is an important part of any wireless solution,” said Dan Karr, senior vice president of sales and marketing for Tzero. “Omron provides an exceptional implementation – optimized for the challenging application of video transmission – that should meet the needs of even the most demanding consumer device manufacturer.”

Previously, on June 1, 2006, OMRON launched the WXA-N1SL SMD Polymeric Antenna for Ultra-Wideband (UWB) applications as the first in a series of wireless, high-frequency Wi-PlaDsTM devices (see note 5).

By applying its proprietary molding technology to polymer, which lends itself to versatile shaping and mass production, OMRON plans to develop a variety of wireless products under the Wi-PlaDsTM brand, including antennas to suit a wide range of device configurations.

Key Features 
1.    Delivers gain flatness and omni directivity in standards-based UWB
2.    Polymer-based antenna that can be molded in various shapes to fit perfectly and optimize space in a variety of devices.
3.    Optimized to work with UWB MIMO solutions such as TZero’s Ultra-MIMO™ technology, which minimizes packet loss to ensure flicker-free and jitter-less image transmission.

Planned Specifications

Model No.

WXA-S1FL

Size (φ x H)

Φ23  x 39.5  mm

Frequency range

3.1 to 4.9 GHz

VSWR

3 max.

Gain

0 dBi max.

Flatness for each bandwidth

3 dB max. (reference value)

Omni directivity

2 dB max. (reference value)


Note: The above specifications may be changed.

Note 1 - UWB Communications
UWB (Ultra-wideband) is a next-generation, short-range, high-speed wireless transmission technology that uses ultra-wideband electro-magnetic waves, and is suitable for use in wireless USB and image transfer applications. Commercial use of UWB communications was approved in the United States in February 2002 and in Japan in August 2006.

Note 2 - MIMO Technology
MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) technology spatially increases the bandwidth for wireless communications by combining multiple antennas, thus making wireless communications even faster. The use of more than one antenna also stabilizes transmission and improves communications.

Note 3 - UltraMIMO Technology
UltraMIMO™ is Tzero's unique implementation of MIMO that enables links to continue delivering content flawlessly, even in the presence of hostile interferers. The performance gains of UltraMIMO include: increased range, increased link reliability and interference cancellation.

Note 4 - Gain Flatness
Denotes minimal variation in gain for each frequency within defined ultra-wide bandwidth.

Note 5 - Wi-PlaDs TM       
Wi-PlaDs is a registered trademark for OMRON’s wireless high-frequency devices. The name derives from “Wireless Polymeric Advanced Devices.”  

About OMRON
Headquartered in Kyoto, Japan, OMRON Corporation is a global leader in the field of automation. Established in 1933 and headed by President and CEO Hisao Sakuta, OMRON has more than 27,000 employees in over 35 countries working to provide products and services to customers in a variety of fields including industrial automation, electronic components, social systems (ticket gate machines, ticket vending machines, and traffic control), and healthcare. The company is divided into five regions and head offices are in Japan (Kyoto), Asia Pacific (Singapore), China (Shanghai), Europe (Amsterdam) and US (Chicago). For more information, visit OMRON's website at http://www.omron.com.

For sales related enquiries, please contact Masaharu Tsujimoto (info_wiplads@omron.co.jp) Telephone: +81 77 565 6199
WiPlaDs website: http://www.omron.com/ecb/products/whfd/index.html

Bob Crabtree adds
We're more than a little unsure about the gain figure quoted in the above table - 0dBi  - and are trying to check it out. If we find that the figure is wrong, we'll put it right and if it is correct we'll try to explain why such a counter-intuitive figure is right.

HEXUS.links

HEXUS.community :: discussion thread about this article
HEXUS.lifestyle.headline ::  Wireless HDMI promises around-the-house high-def viewing

External.links

OMRON - home page



HEXUS Forums :: 1 Comment

Login with Forum Account

Don't have an account? Register today!
Call for Papers
During the past decade, multiple-antenna transmission (MIMO) systems have matured. However, when comparing their potential capacities with their achieved throughputs, we notice large gaps. The price for the MIMO advantages is implementation complexity and the use of specific signal processing tools that cannot be directly inferred from one-to-one (i.e. single-channel) systems. For instance, water-filling does not seem feasible due to the large amount of required feedback information. State-of-the-art standards like 3GPP and WiMax support only very limited feedback. Nevertheless, adaptive modulation and coding (AMC) schemes, selective space-time coding, as well as antenna selection have shown that significant improvements are achievable even with very limited feedback. In this setting, MIMO-OFDM schemes are of central interest to industry and academia. For instance, an important challenge is to find an adequate representation of the MIMO channel's quality—independently of the system architecture and signal processing techniques currently available. A proper labeling or characterization of the MIMO channel quality regardless of the spatial processing to be used enables deciding on the reception or transmission strategy to use (e.g. with or without channel state information, to optimize diversity or rate, etc.) and, thus, on the amount of feedback that is required in transmission.

MIMO transmission can be point-to-point or distributed, in fact, when looking not just into the physical layer, but also into the link layer, feedback load is especially critical in multiuser MIMO systems because of its much higher number of degrees of freedom. Opportunistic scheduling strategies have been developed which (more or less heuristically) take into account the requirements on QoS.

This special issue focuses on such transmission systems with limited feedback and provides an overview of the state of the art.

Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Adaptive modulation and coding
Selective space-time coding
Antenna and beam selection
Adaptive beamforming techniques
Codebook selection for CSI feedback
Rate distortion for feedback systems
Approximate water-filling techniques
Feedback in highly mobile environments
MIMO with statistical feedback
Nonlinear/adaptive MIMO precoding
Fundamental limits on performance and robustness
Opportunistic schemes
MIMO and QoS diversity
Inclusion of MIMO concepts in wireless standards
Feedback in MIMO-OFDM and OFDMA schemes
Cross-layer approaches to multiuser MIMO scheduling
Authors should follow the EURASIP JASP manuscript format described at the journal site Prospective authors should submit an electronic copy of their complete manuscript through the EURASIP JASP Manuscript Tracking System , according to the following timetable:

Manuscript Due June 1, 2007
First Round of Reviews September 1, 2007
Publication Date December 1, 2007

Guest Editors:

Markus Rupp, Institute of Communications and Radio-Frequency Engineering, Vienna University of Technology, Gusshausstrasse 25/389, 1040 Wien, Austria

Ana Pérez-Neira, Department of Signal Theory and Communications, Technical University of Catalonia, North Campus, Jordi Girona 1-3, 08034 Barcelona, Spain

David Gesbert, Eurecom Institute, 2229 Route des Cretes, BP 193, 06904 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France

Christoph Mecklenbräuker, The Telecommunications Research Center Vienna (ftw.), 1220 Wien, Austria