This company continues to develop excellent technology for mass markets.
ParkerVision Announces Breakthrough in Wireless Radio Frequency Technology; Company
Invents the First Universal Direct Conversion Receiver IC's
PR Newswire, Wednesday, December 10, 1997 at 08:48
Low Cost/High Performance RF Receiver Chips Now Available
JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Dec. 10 /PRNewswire/ -- ParkerVision
(NASDAQ:PRKR)today announced a major breakthrough in wireless radio frequency
(RF) technology that has the potential to revolutionize wireless electronics
by obsoleting many of the techniques and associated circuitry commonly
employed in today's RF receivers. The Company now intends to market this new
technology that dramatically simplifies wireless electronics while delivering
high performance results at a very low cost. The technology creates a new
category of RF receiver which the Company calls the Universal Direct
Conversion Receiver and which the Company feels to be the long-awaited
building block for creating the next generation of RF electronics.
The Company feels the technology will be broadly utilized in applications
for both digital and analog data transmission. Some of the wide range of
products that the Company feels will benefit from this technology are cordless
telephones, both home and PCS/cellular, pagers, garage door openers, toys,
security systems, user input devices and peripherals for consumer electronics
and personal computers, walkie/talkies, microphones, speakers, audio monitors,
intercoms, local and wide area networks, utility meter reading, smart cards,
identification tagging, and others.
The performance of the ParkerVision Universal Direct Conversion Receiver
is unique as it supports broadly deployed transmitter communication formats
and transmitter frequencies from 1 Megahertz (Mhz) to 1 Gigahertz (Ghz). The
first generation of the technology has been incorporated into an integrated
circuit (IC) which has been code named "Eddie." Unlike current receiver
technology, ParkerVision's technology creates a receiver IC that can be used
across a broad range of applications. Eddie efficiently receives most types
of RF transmissions and processes it down to an optimized baseband signal in a
single step with miniscule distortion.
Jeffrey Parker, CEO stated, "We believe our years of investment to develop
this technology will prove to have been the proper strategy as ParkerVision
emerges as a significant influence in the high growth wireless industry. Now
that we have completed the first generation of our wireless technology, we are
looking forward to working with the many product companies that can benefit
from this revolutionary breakthrough. We plan to establish mutually
beneficial partnerships and to be a genuinely valuable resource for those in
the wireless products business. We will do this through product development
relationships and licensing agreements."
Mr. Parker further commented, "We are certain that there are also many new
wireless architectures that our technology now makes possible. For example,
with our Universal Direct Conversion Receiver technology we created a very low
cost FM data link that can move megabits of digital data and has over 100
times (20db) more interference rejection than a traditional FM link, yet costs
much less. This kind of reliability and low cost is lacking in today's RF
electronics. In addition to the benefits that can be derived from applying
our technology to traditional wireless products, our goal is to help create
new and unique products and systems in concert with those visionaries who have
been waiting for the breakthroughs that our technology represents, and
together raise the standards by which RF products are judged."
The Company said that Eddie, which is currently available, receives and
processes any frequency from 1 Mhz to 1 Ghz, consumes less than 10 mA of
power, passes signal bandwidths up to 3 Mhz, provides excellent signal to
noise allowing for high gain/high sensitivity, and costs a fraction of the
current RF electronics that Eddie replaces.
CTO David Sorrells commented, "The technology specifications for our
Universal Direct Conversion Receiver reads like the wish list of RF and
wireless product designers, which we believe will assure its acceptance in a
wide range of products and applications. What motivated us to develop the
technology were the years that we spent struggling with the many mutually
exclusive goals imposed by traditional RF electronics. Strive for low cost
and you dramatically compromise performance and quality. Traditional RF
design and manufacturing complexity far exceeded any of the other electrical
engineering disciplines we worked with. We knew there just had to be a better
way."
Mr. Sorrells further commented, "We feel the cost of implementing our
technology will be a significant savings over what is currently available, and
will significantly shorten design times. In almost all circumstances,
performance will increase while cost, size, and power consumption will
decrease. In fact, we feel our technology to be the first clear path to high
performance/low cost, complete RF receiver and transceiver integration. The
technology can be implemented in a number of IC foundry processes making it a
natural to combine with currently available IC's such as microprocessors,
digital signal processors, and application specific circuits."
ParkerVision also announced that it is already working on feature
enhancements to Eddie. Among the advancements expected to be announced in
1998 are operational frequencies up to several Ghz, performance
characteristics that far exceed any commercially available RF electronics that
the company knows of, and companion system IC's. |
