Custom Communications System Design
The development of a new communications system is a significant undertaking
but for the right applications a custom communications system design
can offer significant benefits over using an established standard such
as GSM, W-CDMA, Bluetooth,
Wi-Fi or WiMAX.
Whilst these established standards do offer well defined hardware and
software specifications to allow user and network equipment to be designed,
they are usually aimed at offering a specific cost/performance characteristic
depending on the intended market. Plextek has a wealth of experience
in radio communications system design as well as the detailed radio
communications product design.
With the use of the more popular standards, such as GSM, the economies
of scale start to bring real advantages to the equipment designer and
users alike as significant research and development is focused on component
and IP block design. This often results in falling hardware costs and
increasing performance. The advantages from using established system
standards can therefore be significant when the desired functionality
is a good fit with the originally intended scope of the standard.
For most applications this is the
optimum route and Plextek has designed a significant number of products to
standards such as GSM, DECT, Bluetooth and others. However for some applications
the use of an existing standard is not the optimum route.
The typical reasons for this are:-
- No standard offers the performance
necessary for the intended environment
- The radio frequency spectrum
allocation makes use of a standard unfeasible
- For very simple communications
devices a standard's based solution maybe cost prohibitive
Plextek has undertaken the design
of a number of custom radio systems and further detail on three of these is
given below.
