Penn Engineers have developed a tunable filter using yttrium iron garnet (YIG) that addresses past issues with GPS signal interference and supports future high-frequency band communications. This compact and power-efficient filter offers a scalable solution for emerging wireless technologies. Credit: Troy Olsson, Xingyu Du In the early 2010s, LightSquared , a multibillion-dollar startup promising to revolutionize cellular communications, declared bankruptcy.
The company couldn’t figure out how to prevent its signals from interfering with those of GPS systems. Now, Penn Engineers have developed a new tool that could prevent such problems from ever happening again: an adjustable filter that can successfully prevent interference, even in higher-frequency bands of the electromagnetic spectrum. “I hope it will enable the next generation of wireless communications,” says Troy Olsson, Associate Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) at Penn Engineering and the senior author of a new paper in Nature Communications that describes the filter.
The electromagnetic spectrum itself is one of the modern world’s most precious resources; only a tiny fraction of the spectrum, mostly radio waves, representing less than one billionth of one percent of the overall spectrum, is suitable for wireless communication. Federal Regulations and Spectrum Usage The bands of that fraction of the spectrum are carefully controlled by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which on.
