Ethertronics’ plug-and-play active antenna system solutions ease integration woes for M2M vendors

CTIA WIRELESS 2013, USA: Ethertronics, a leading technology company enabling innovative active antenna and RF system solutions to deliver the best connected experience, is showcasing its industry-leading, plug-and-play M2M solutions – including EtherModule 1.0 and EtherLTE – this week during CTIA 2013 in Las Vegas.

EtherModule 1.0 leverages Ethertronics’ extensive expertise in advanced antenna architecture, RF systems, and chip design to deliver the industry’s only plug-and-play module for M2M solutions. EtherLTE is the only integrated, plug-and-play active antenna system for M2M modules covering 2G, 3G, and 4G LTE.

Given their plug-and-play designs, both EtherModule 1.0 and EtherLTE enable product designers to quickly deliver high-performance M2M designs in very small form factors, while overcoming challenging RF environments, such as frequency drifts, environmental effects, and hand and head effects.

EtherModule 1.0 – a turnkey, plug-and-play active antenna system module – addresses the challenges facing today’s product designers for M2M applications and other wireless devices. Combining Ethertronics’ advanced antenna architecture and its proprietary EtherChip 1.0 tunable capacitor gives Ethertronics full control of the optimization and enables easy integration in any M2M device.

EtherModule 1.0 is a highly modular and optimized broad band self-tuning antenna solution enabling integration in any M2M device. Given the combination of closed loop functionality with a proprietary algorithm integrated in conjunction with a microprocessor, the module is capable of dynamically sensing and optimizing the antenna system, without external control signals from the device.

This approach provides tuning capability; seamlessly adjusting the characteristics of the antenna to its dynamic requirements – including frequency shift, hand, head and environmental effects, or more bandwidth. EtherModule 1.0 minimizes the need for additional engineering design time and gets M2M products to market faster. Its compact size at 35x15x10mm and ability to cover a wide range of frequency needs – from 100MHz up to several GHz covering 2G, 3G, 4G cellular as well as Bluetooth, ISM, WiFi, and ZigBee bands – make it ideal for M2M devices.

The active antenna system technologies behind EtherModule 1.0 have been commercially integrated into products, where high performance and reliability are critical, such as an automated medicine dispenser and cabinet, enabling accurate readings even in the most challenging RF environments, ensuring medication is available and verifying that the correct medication is dispensed and administered.

EtherLTE is a PCB antenna with all components integrated into a single plug-and-play active antenna solution. By utilizing Active Band Switching techniques, EtherLTE is able to cover the lower cellular and LTE frequency bands at 700-960MHz, as well as the higher bands at 1710-2170MHz. At 44.0x10.0x3.3mm, the compact antenna system can be easily integrated into smaller form factors.