Drawing on the money, people and time that is available to the military, e-tenna Corp. in Laurel, Md., developed antenna technology that it says will make commercial wireless handset antennas more efficient while costing less.
E-tenna introduced its Radio Frequency 2 Intermediate Frequency antenna technology last week. Capable of supporting multiple technologies and frequencies from 700 MHz to 2.5 GHz, RF2IF integrates various components, including diplexers, filters, switches and the antenna itself to create greater radiation efficiency for the phone.
“We work back into the radio so you can eliminate more components,” said Andrew Humen, director of marketing for e-tenna.
Lee Stein, chairman and chief executive officer of e-tenna, said many companies have focused their efforts on developing software or digital circuitry that enables radios to operate in multiple modes, but the RF portion of the phone is extremely important as well.
“Reworking RF design is critical to making software-defined radios work,” Stein said.
“The only way to improve RF functionality, and support it in a smaller package, is to reduce interference and engineer better material that better utilizes wavelengths,” he added.
In technical terms, RF2IF uses an artificial magnetic conductor, a unique reactive surface realized on a print circuit board that inhibits the flow of tangential electric surface current, thereby approximating a zero tangential magnetic field, e-tenna said. It is this unique surface material on the circuit board that improves antenna radiation efficiency and has the potential to extend battery life, increase talk time and reduce radiation absorption by the user.
E-tenna said in testing, artificial magnetic conductor technology has yielded performance gains of 2 dB to 4 dB, which can increase wireless system coverage by 15 to 20 percent. The technology also suppresses undesired radio-frequency currents, reducing noise that would otherwise have a negative impact on capacity.
E-tenna has four patents issued and six patents pending for its technologies that also include global positioning system, cellular base station and phased array broadband wireless antennas. Humen said the company will license the technology to original equipment manufacturers as early as this summer, but he was uncertain when RF2IF might actually make it into phones since OEMs and carriers must first conduct their own tests and integrate the technology into their product cycles.
“It is very hard for anyone to duplicate, but it’s easy for a licensee to manufacture,” Humen said.
E-tenna is an 11-month-old subsidiary of San Diego-based Titan Corp., and has approximately 28 employees, mostly engineers. Much of the technology was born from research and development conducted at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
