CELLONICS

CELLONICS

The Modulation and Demodulation Technology

-Blog By Ashwini Nasre (Final Year Student, ETC, ACET, Nagpur)

Idea: Are you tired of slow modem connections? Cellonics Incorporated has developed new technology that may end this and other communications problems forever. The new modulation and demodulation technology is called Cellonics.

    In digital communication, CellonicsTM offers a fundamental change to the way modem solutions have traditionally been designed and built. It introduces a simple and  swift-Rate decoding solution to the receiving and decoding of a modulated signal.

Outline: The technology names as CELLONICS as it was invented by the scientists from CWC (Center of Wireless Communication) and Computational Science Department in Singapore.

 For the last 60 years, the way radio receivers are designed and built has undergoes amazingly little changes. Much of the current approach circuit could be attributed to EH Armstrong, the oft-credited Father of  FM, who invented the super heterodyne method in 1918. He further developed it into the completely FM commercial system in 1933 for use in public-radio broadcasting. Today, more than 98% of receivers in radios, television and mobile phones use this method.

  In general, this technology will allow for modem speeds that are 1,000 times faster than our present modems. The development is based on the way biological cells communicate with each other and nonlinear dynamical systems (NDS). Major Telco’s, which are telecommunications companies, will benefit from the incredible speed, simplicity, and robustness of this new technology, as well as individual users. In current technology, the ASCII uses a combination of ones and zeros to display a single letter of the alphabet (Cellonics, 2001). Then the data is sent over radio frequency cycle to its destination where it is then decoded. The original technology also utilizes carrier signals as a reference which uses hundreds of wave cycles before a decoder can decide on the bit value (Legard, 2001), whether the bit is a one or a zero, in order to translate that into a single character. The Cellonics technology came about after studying biological cell behaviour. The study showed that human cells respond to stimuli and generate waveforms that consist of a continuous line of pulses separated by periods of silence.

  The Cellonics technology found a way to mimic these pulse signals and apply them to the communications industry (Legard, 2001). The Cellonics element accepts slow analog waveforms as input and in return produces predictable, fast pulse output, thus encoding digital information and sending it over communication channels. Nonlinear Dynamical Systems (NDS) are the mathematical formulations required to simulate the cell responses and were used in building Cellonics. Because the technique is nonlinear, performance can exceed the norm, but at the same time, implementation is straightforward (Legard, 2001). This technology will be most beneficial to businesses that do most of their work by remote and with the use of portable devices. The Cellonics technology will provide these devices with faster, better data for longer periods of time (Advantages, 2001). Cellonics also utilizes a few discrete components, most of which are bypassed or consume very little power. This reduces the number of off the shelf components in portable devices while dramatically decreasing the power used, leading to a lower cost for the entire device. The non-portable devices of companies will benefit from the lack of components the machines have and the company will not have to worry so much about parts breaking.

IDEOLOGIES OF THE TECHNOLOGY

  The Cellonics technology is revolutionary and unconventional approach based on the nonlinear dynamical systems and modeled after biological cell behavior. When used in the field of communication, the technology has the ability to encode, transmit and decode the digital information powerfully over a variety of physical channels, be they cables or wirelessly through air.

    It encodes and decodes signals at one cycle per symbol- a feature not found elsewhere. It simplicity will absolute the super heterodyne receiver design that has been in use since its invention by Major Edward Armstrong in 1918. In fact, according to one estimate, 98% of the world’s radio systems are still based on this super heterodyne design. Cellonics incorporated has invented and patented a number of circuits that mimic about the above biological cell behavior. Cellonics technology circuits are incredibly simple with the advantages of low-cost, low power consumption and smallness of size. When applied in communication, Cellonics technology is a fundamental modulation and demodulation technique. These receivers are used as devices that generate the pulses from the received analog signal and perform demodulation based on pulse counting.

    The subsystem used in super heterodyne design consists of RF (radio-frequency) amplifiers, mixers, filters, oscillators, phase locked loops and other components which are all complex, noisy and power hungry. Capturing a communications element from air to retrieve its modulated signal is not easy and a system often needs to spend thousands of carrier cycles to recover just one bit information. This process of demodulation is inefficient and newly emerging schemes results in complex chips difficult and expensive to manufacture. So it was necessary to invent the new demodulation circuit, which does the job of conventional super heterodyne receiver but after a far lesser component count, faster and lower in power consumption, and processing greater signal robustness. These requirements were met by designing a circuit which models the biological cell behavior.

SIMPLE CELLONIC CIRCUIT

    Cellonics incorporated has developed the number of patented families of simple cellonics circuits that are useful for various applications. One of these cellonics circuits is extremely simple circuit that exhibits the ‘S curve’ transfer characteristics. The circuit also contains the negative impedance converter.

    The transfer characteristics consist of three different regions. The two lines at the top and the bottom have positive slope i.e. 1/RF and they represent the region in which the OP-AMP is operated in saturated (nonlinear) mode. The middle segment has the negative slope (negative resistance) which represents that the OP-AMP is operated linearly. It is the negative resistance region which allows the OP-AMP to oscillate and produce pulses which are bounded by the negative and positive saturating voltages.

   For the ease of explanation, consider the transfer characteristics as shown as above. Let us assumed the input voltage to be a triangular input voltage waveform. Here we have dVs/dt the negative slope, the number of pulses to be assumed at the output =V0 (depending on the slope of triangular input waveform). Whenever the slope is positive, the OP-AMP is stable and the outputs are the constant saturation voltages. Thus the silent period is observed i.e. no spike is present. On the other hand, with properly selected circuit parameter whenever the slope of input triangular waveform is negative, the OP-AMP is unstable. In this region, the output is oscillating in nature.

   The duration of each pulse is similar and the number of pulses generated depends on the length of time that the slope remains negative. Thus by controlling the duration of negative slope, the number of pulses to be produced at the output of OP-AMP can be controlled. The Cellonics circuits are robust against noise perturbations- as long as the effective negative slope keeps the OP-AMP circuit unstable, the noise will not have the effect on the pulse generation. The level of tolerance against the noise perturbations is carried out by proper selection of circuit parameters in the design.

INFERENCE

  The Cellonics communication method is one inspired by how biological cell signal. It is a fresh and novel look at how digital signals may be conveyed. In this digital day and age, it is timely; current digital communication designs are mostly derived from old analog signal methods. With the cellonics method, much of the sub-systems, in a traditional communication system are not required. Noise generating and power consuming systems such as voltage controlled oscillators, PLLs, mixers; power amplifiers, etc. are eliminated. To a communications engineer, this is unheard off. One just doesn’t build a communication device without an oscillator, mixer, etc.

   Such is the revolutionary impact of Cellonics. Engineers will have to reform their thinking that such a simple solution is possible.