Cambridge Consultants Complete All-Digital Radio

After building the world's first all-digital radio transmitter, Cambridge Consultants announced that it now has added a digital receiver to complete its digital radio.

The United Kingdom-based product development and technology consulting firm unveiled its Pizzicato all-digital radio transmitter in March 2015. It consists of an integrated circuit outputting a single stream of bits, and an antenna – with no conventional radio parts or digital-to-analogue converter. Cambridge Consultants says its patented algorithms can perform 78 billion calculations per second on less than one square millimeter of today’s silicon, which is incapable of performing calculations at those rates. Until Pizzicato, the ability to shift between analogue and digital at radio frequency, at ultrafast speeds, was a challenging barrier to creating all-digital radios.

Now, the wireless development team at Cambridge Consultants claims it's one step closer to fully building its digital radio with the addition of a digital receiver.

“We have a vision for radios to follow the same path as microprocessors, which have moved from expensive pieces of technology to increasingly capable and cheap devices that are installed in everyday products," said Bryan Donoghue, digital systems group leader at Cambridge Consultants, reports Business Weekly. “By moving radios into the digital domain, we’ve put them on a path to dramatic improvements in cost, size and performance – as predicted by Moore’s Law. This radical approach to making low-cost and highly flexible radios has huge potential for wireless innovation.”

Pizzicato is said to enable truly flexible software-defined radios that are able to change frequency, bandwidth, or radio standard in an instant, allowing a much more dynamic – or ‘cognitive’ – use of the radio spectrum, according to the release.

Unlike ‘software-defined radio’ (SDR), it’s not a mixture of analogue and digital components – for the first time, the radio is completely digital, which can enable new ways of using spectrum intelligently.

Besides presenting as one of many solutions to the "spectrum crunch" problem, Pizzicato could rationalize the economics of future wireless technologies, particularly 5G and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.

Cambridge Consultants envisions its affordable and digital radios making the deployment of 5G networks more affordable, as most planned 5G networks rely on costly multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) methods, requiring huge arrays of radio transceivers. Digital radios also could reduce the complexity and cost of turning traditional analogue radios into IoT chips by allowing the digital radio to be copied between chip designs.

The company is betting that its all-digital radios can be truly disruptive. Cambridge Consultants has a track record of world-firsts: the first single-chip Bluetooth radio, the first wireless implanted pacing system, and the ground-to-air radio system controlling most air traffic today.