OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Limited and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. today announced development of a high-sensitivity receiver chip that will pave the way to high-capacity, gigabit-capable wireless devices operating at 240GHz in the millimeter-wave(1) frequency band.

The 240GHz band is a frequency range over 100 times wider than that used by typical mobile devices today (0.8-2GHz), which should enable a 100-fold increase in communications capacity. To achieve such an increase, however, requires amplifiers with high amplification ratios that can receive signals that have become very faint when transmitted through the air.

Given this, Fujitsu and Fujitsu Laboratories have developed a technology for multistage amplifiers that increases amplification ratios while suppressing an amplifier's oscillator effect, and a technology that efficiently transmits the amplifier's output signal to the next stage. The result is that the receiver chip's sensitivity is increased roughly tenfold, making possible the reception of large data volumes by smartphones or other mobile devices using a compact antenna.

A portion of these research results were obtained through "R&D Program on Multi-tens Gigabit Wireless Communication Technology at Subterahertz Frequencies," a research program commissioned by Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications as part of its "Research and Development Project for Expansion of Radio Spectrum Resources."

Details of this technology are being presented at CSICS 2013, the Compound Semiconductor IC Symposium, opening October 13 in Monterey, California.