Subject: [NEXTEL-1] In Step Toward Ultrasmall Radio, University of Florida Team Demonstrates On-Chip Antenna

From: NEXTEL-1
Date: Tue, 15 Jun 2004 18:27:46 -0400

In Step Toward Ultrasmall Radio, University of Florida Team Demonstrates
On-Chip Antenna
Source: AScribe
Publication date: 2004-06-06

GAINESVILLE, Fla., May 11 (AScribe Newswire) -- Like the signals it
emits, the radio may soon disappear from sight.
University of Florida electrical engineers have installed a radio
antenna less than one-tenth of an inch long on a computer chip and
demonstrated that it can send and receive signals across a room. The
achievement is another step in the team's continuing efforts to build an
"ultrasmall radio chip" - a transceiver, processor and battery all
placed on a chip not much larger than a pinhead - and one that could one
day be used for applications ranging from detecting illegal border
crossing to ensuring bridge and tunnel safety.

"This project is about building very small radios that are very hard to
detect, both electrically and physically," said Ken O, a UF professor of
electrical and computer engineering and one of six authors of an article
reported in last month's edition of Electrical and Electronics
Engineering Electron Device Letters. "Since the antenna is usually the
biggest part of the radio, this is a significant step."

Tiny, cheap and disposable radios are seen as having many applications -
and not for dialing in tunes from BB-sized Walkmans. Instead, the goal
is to pair the radios with equally tiny, inexpensive sensors as a way of
saturating large areas with sensing and communication capabilities. O
said other researchers have suggested, for example, that airplanes could
drop radio-motion detectors by the hundreds of thousands along borders,
creating an electronic eavesdropping "fence" that would alert
authorities to anyone crossing the border illegally. Each radio would be
powerful enough to transmit information to the next radio, creating a
single large network that could be monitored from afar.

"Instead of building fences, you could just deploy these things (radio
sensors)," O said.
Another potential application: Pairing the radios with force or strain
sensors implanted throughout bridges, dams or tunnels, with the goal of
reporting small defects before they mushroom into disastrous problems.
Equipped with microphones, the radios also could make excellent covert
listening devices, because they are so tiny and their individual signals
so weak that they are difficult to detect both by with the naked eye and
electronically, O said.

Joe Brewer, a UF professor of electrical and computer engineering and
member of the research team, said other possible applications include
using the tiny radio "nodes" in place of heavy wiring in aircraft and
spacecraft, which need to be as light as possible. The nodes could also
be used in factories to monitor the progress of items as they progress
down the line.
"We're not at the stage where we're really working on the details or
applications - what we're trying to do is create the basic capability,"
he said.

Some groups have sought to achieve such communication networks using
tiny optical devices, but this approach has difficulty of aiming the
information-carrying light from one optical device to another, O said.
In research sponsored by the Semiconductor Research Corp. and the
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the UF group has
made steady progress on true single chip radios.

Two years ago, the group announced it had achieved radio communication
across a single fingernail-sized chip. The current research
significantly extends the communication range to at least 16 feet in
free space, O said.
Brewer said the chief importance of the latest research is that it
changes some of the traditional "ground rules" governing ultrasmall
radio design - namely that the antenna has to be a separate unit from
the rest of the on-chip radio.
"The impact here is that the problem of taking radio frequency signals
from an antenna through electrical connections in wires to get it to a
chip has always been difficult, and this (the latest research)
eliminates an interface," he said. "It makes the whole assembly much
more rugged."

The next step in creating the tiny radios will be to miniaturize the
crystal oscillator that tunes into the radio frequency, O said. The
eventual goal is to produce radios that cost less than $1 each, O said.
CONTACTS

Writer: Aaron Hoover, 352-392-0186, [email-masked]
Source: Kenneth O, 352-392-6618, [email-masked]
Publication date: 2004-06-06

http://cnniw.yellowbrix.com/pages/cnniw/Story.nsp?story_id=52235999&ID=cnniw&scategory=Telecommunications%3AWireless&

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