Green radio partnership

Samsung Electronics has signed an agreement to collaborate with IMEC on technologies for green radios.

The research collaboration topics will include cognitive, reconfigurable radio baseband and millimetre-wave wireless communications technologies.

The new technologies developed with IMEC could be incorporated into Samsung’s next-generation mobile devices.

IMEC, a Belgium-based nanotechnology research centre, has conducted significant research in the past on software-defined radios that support the major standards for wireless communications.

The hope is to push this research one step further towards cognitive radios, which are ICs with a radio that adapts itself to the changing communication standard, available communication frequencies and conditions such as indoor/outdoor, signal strength and movement.

IMEC is working on the control algorithms that take into account these changing environment parameters and user needs.

Researchers at the centre already develop radio ICs for the wireless communication of massive data streams, such as uncompressed high-definition television streams.

These data streams require a high throughput in the order of Gbits per second.