Ethertronics Antennas for M2M and IoT
September 2015 – At CTIA the team from Ethertronics was showing off their new smart antenna solutions. The 15 yr old company has already shipped over 1.3B antennas on over 100 designs from their standard parts and custom design inventory. The antennas are available in passive and active form for 3G and 4G applications. Their recently released standard product is an 8 band 2G/3G/4G surface mount antenna that is used in consumer, industrial and automotive applications that are both user operated and M2M. The antenna units are vendor agnostic on the baseband and driver vendor and is optimized for MIMO applications.
On the active side is a new active antenna chip. The chip has an integrated micro controller that supports a 4 port RF interface and a multi-frequency tunable capacitor. The tunable capacitor is used in combination with a 1.5-3dB adjustable antenna gain. This controller interface is customizable between SPI, I2C, UART and MIPI protocols. The EC446 chip is designed to support Bluetooth, GSM/WCDMA/LTE, WiFi, RFID and GPS communications with a maximum 6GHz bandwidth for M2M products, wireless phones, tablets, notebooks, IoT, and other wireless devices. For low power operation there is a sleep mode that powers down the microcontroller.
In addition to the active antenna chip, they release a new antenna module the Ethermodule 2.0. This is a full closed loop antenna system that uses the EC446 chip. The module drops into applications equivalently to using a passive antenna, however, the system is active, includes the microcontroller guidance so it locks on and tracks frequencies. The plug-and-play module provides an adaptive antenna solution capable of dynamically sensing and optimizing the antenna system, without external control signals from the device using closed loop functionality with a proprietary algorithm that is integrated in the EC446 microprocessor. The system is capable of correcting the impedance mismatch and retuning the antenna to be centered by compensating for frequency shifts caused by environmental changes, such as loading changes due to hand or head proximity in the wireless signal. This automated capability allows for simple integration into M2M and other designs as there is no SDK or software required to use the part.
All of these chips and modules are currently available and shipping both from Ethertronics and their distributor Digikey.
