Turning conceptual ideas into usable technology
His research team, made up of himself and fellow student Neil Naude (22), as well as their supervisors, came across a new and useful discovery in their final year of undergraduate study.
We live in a world of signals and transmitters, from the use of remote controls to open garages and gates to the transfer of music from a computer to a cellphone.
Bozanic and his team have electronically spread similar signals in frequency, by means of a custom developed micro-chip. The result is a faster, more secure and accurate signal.
“We’ve developed a new method of coding signals that no one has ever used before on a chip,” Bozanic says. “What happens is that we have all these forms of communications such as wireless computer networks and decoders. They all use analogue or digital transmission techniques over certain frequencies. They all, however, have signals that need to be coded differently. We use complex spreading sequences for coding.”
This is important so that the signals do not interfere with each other. “If you don’t synchronise the signals, you won’t be able to recover them,” Bozanic says“Our method of spreading the signal on a specialised circuit chip allows for greater clarity and strength of the signal.”
Once the chips are manufactured and commercialised the signals can be used to set up wireless local area networks (WLANs). This means you could, for example, set up your whole office space and link devices such as printers, fax machines, cellphone and PDA’s to each other and to the Internet without the use of wires. Though there are already WLANs available commercially, Bozanic’s and Naude’s findings will help speed up and strengthen the signals leading to better data reception, as well as provide better security for the data being transferred.
“Ideally it would be commercially viable in a hospital or home environment,” Bozanic says.
The discovery of a new signal system was made during Bozanic’s and Naude’s studies at Tuks and was part of their compulsory final-year research project. Their joint research paper, with the complex title: Analogue CMOS direct sequence spectrum transceiver with carrier recovery employing complex spreading sequences, recently reached the final round of an international micro-electronics competition in Spain hosted by the International Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. They were ranked among the top six finalists.
“In our final year we are all required to do a research assignment based on a list of 200 possible projects,” Bozanic says. “This one looked interesting to me and I’ve never looked back since I realised the importance of what we were doing."
Previously, Bozanic won another award for this micro-electronic project. It was given to him by the only micro electronic company in SA called Sames.
Bozanic started working full-time this year, so he had to put the physical design of the chip system on hold.
Although it sounds all technical, Bozanic reassures us that the building blocks for such electronics are quite simple. “We get these computer software programs that help design the circuits according to certain rules and guidelines,” he says. “Once designed, the manufacturers just duplicate the design using combinations of metals and silicon.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s cheap to create hardware. Creating the first design can be very expensive. Developing a chip takes at least three versions, or incarnations, and just one sample version of about 10 chips (one millimetre by one millimetre each) costs about à 30000, Bozanic says.
Although the project has huge ramifications, there are technical and financial hiccups that will determine whether it will take off soon. Bozanic’s project is fourth generation (4G) technology. But the market is still trying to sell 3G technology.
The project is fully patented so there are no worries about the ideas being copied by someone else. “The use of complex spreading sequences is also SA patented,” Bozanic says.
In the meantime, Bozanic has a rough idea of the amounts in royalties that could come from the sale and use of the technology.
“We are talking millions of dollars — I can’t wait to have the chip on my desk,” he says.
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