I love how industry came up with ever crazier schemes to stream content from phones and laptops to TVs. There must have been three different attempts involving WiFi alone, but this phased array mmWave 60 GHz million bucks basic research abomination surely takes the cake.<p>Meanwhile, some Google engineer realized you could solve 90% of phone-to-TV streaming applications and 100% of the hard technical problems by just telling the TV to download and display the YouTube video itself. Genius!
Phased arrays are very cool tech. Personally, I can't wait for visible-wavelength optical phased arrays to hit the mainstream (they're just now being implemented), since they'd enable tech like legitimately holographic displays and video cameras with digitally programmable optical zoom.
>Now the bad news: SiBeam was bought by Lattice Semiconductor, and right before I gave this talk, Lattice shut down the entire SiBeam organization and ended support and production of this part. I didn’t find out about this until months later, when I contacted the sales engineers I had been talking to about this part and they told me what happened.<p>This is one thing that really pisses me off. Time and time again you've got small(ish) companies doing interesting stuff, succeeding and then they step on a landline. They do something that gets them in the cross hairs of a big company and suddenly BOOM big company buys small company for ridiculous money and then inexplicably shuts down 90% of what the small company was doing. The sale happens for a nice premium and yet the second the sale is closed 90% of the things that the company did that made it valuable are jettisoned. How can it be that these companies can afford to buy companies at a premium, throw away massive parts of the value of the company and yet: this obvious value destruction seems to be standard operating procedure for large companies.
> What would be really cool is to build a USB board that plugs into one of the SB9210 boards and connects to gnuradio. You could do all kinds of neat radar experiments, presence detection, beam forming, you name it. Kind of like a 60 GHz RTL-SDR.<p>Maybe a dumb question, but how is it even possible to do SDR with 60GHz signal on a ~4GHz CPU via a 5Gbps USB3 connection?<p>EDIT: I guess via down-conversion? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_down_converter" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_down_converter</a>
Since the wavelength of 60GHz is approximately 5 millimeters, this technology is sometimes referred to as millimeter-wave (mm-wave). (Copied quote).<p>That explains how close together the antennas are - close enough compared to wavelength to be able to beamform.<p>Edit: also explains why it would be extremely difficult to build something yourself at 60GHz - where every wire needs length to be matched to submillimeter length, and a submillimeter tail acts as an antenna and as an electronic component.
Does anyone recall in the Long Dark Ago when there was a startup that was planning to embed a phased antenna array into a cubicle wall?<p>It still gets me the level of miniaturization that happens when you come back to an idea 20 years later, instead of watching the incremental changes along the way.
Maybe silly question, Are there some other commercially available chips with phased arrays?<p>I believe RTL SDR did extend the RTL products end of life much further.<p>COuld this occur with this (or similar) phased array chips?
I wonder what sorts of things the chips were used for inside laptops and smart TVs. He mentions it being used for streaming, but it's a directional radar chip, seems it would be used for doing a 3d scan of an area?
I wonder what sort of API could be used to control that kind of phased array. I guess that's the point of the blog post though: asking for help with reverse engineering its interface.