Electronics Letters: volume 47 issue 1

Featured article

On the receiving end

A receiver for portable multi-Gbit/s wireless communications at 60 GHz has been fabricated in 65 nm CMOS by researchers at UCLA in the US. One of the team, Ning-Yi Wang, tells us more.

Also in this issue

• Editorial

  Welcome to the first issue of Volume 47 and to the second year of the new-look Electronics Letters.

  
  

• Joining the dots

  UK researchers have extended the emission wavelength of quantum dots on GaAs to 1.52 μm using a bilayer growth technique.

  
  

• Canonical reduction

  Canonical signed digit (CSD) representation for digital arithmetic is often used to reduce the number of additions required in constant and variable multiplications, but the full advantages have so far not been exploited. Now, researchers from Singapore and Sweden have developed a powerful but simple CSD converter circuit with extremely low logic area.

  
  

• Three to one

  Researchers from Brazil have proposed simplifying topologies to integrate multiple components of photovoltaic cells. Their technique provides battery charging from a photovoltaic panel, DC link of an inverter and soft-switching in one stage, whilst maintaining over 92% efficiency at 500 W along a wide load range.

  
  

• Ambient tune

  Researchers from France have demonstrated the first distributed feedback lasers in the 3.4 μm wavelength range based on an overgrowth-free processing route fabricated on type-I quantum well material. As well as monomode emission under CW device operation at ambient temperatures, their design features a modehop-free tuning range of 8.5 nm.

  
  

• Character assessment

  A technique for high-resolution spectral characterisation of polarisation dependent loss of optical components is presented by researchers from Spain. Based on optical single sideband with suppressed carrier (OSSB-SC) modulation the method avoids polarisation-induced RF fading which is present with OSSB modulation-based techniques, allowing the characterisation of polarisation dependent parameters.

  
  

• Going to ground

  A compact antenna radiation method with good radiation efficiency and impedance bandwidth is presented in work from Korea. The shrinking available space in mobile devices demands ever smaller antennas; threatening bandwidth and efficiency performance. In this work the radiator is formed in the ground plane, shared with other components, and a capacitor requiring very little space which can be used to determine the resonant frequency.