Researchers in Ireland have secured funding to turn their ultra-wideband antenna R&D into a commercial product.
The Centre for Telecommunica-tions Value-Chain Research (CTVR) has received a E90,000 grant to move towards commercialisation of an ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna it is developing.
“What this project is about is really to refine that technology so it’s ready to go to market,” said Professor Donal O’Mahony, director of CTVR.
“At the moment we have what we think is a good research lead in the area. We now have a year to work out exactly what the implications of that are, what shape the product will be, what markets are going to be addressed and then exactly what the next stage is going to be to get it to market,” he said.
The grant has come from Enterprise Ireland’s Proof of Concept/Commercialisation fund.
The miniature UWB antenna has been developed by a research group at the School of Electronic and Communications Engineering at Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT). DIT is one of the eight Irish universities which form the CTVR research network.
According to Max Ammann, leader of the CTVR antenna research group, UWB antennas normally use “an inherently narrowband technology that can become quasi-omnidirectional over part of the bandwidth”. CTVR plans to use techniques which are “inherently wideband and can be tuned to achieve an acceptable trade-off between all design parameters across the full bandwidth required”.
CTVR currently has six commercialisation grant-funded projects. These include a software radio version of a WiMAX transceiver, and cooling technology using pipes for high temperature semiconductors.
“We hope this is the first of a steady stream of commercialisation type projects that’ll create start-up companies and licensing and so on,” said O’Mahony.