“5G” is a term that means different things to different people, but wireless veteran Yossi Cohen hopes it will be defined by a new wave modulation technique that may exponentially increase the amount of data that networks can handle. Cohen and his partner are calling their new modulation WAM, and are reporting that it produces a system gain advantage of up to 10 deci-Bells. WAM reportedly allows data to travel up to 400% further before signals degrade, while using 50% less power and 50% less spectrum than existing technologies.
“MagnaCom’s WAM technology looks very promising, and once proven could become the primary driver for the next wave of global communications upgrades, wired and wireless,” said Will Strauss, president of Forward Concepts. “It might even be incorporated into the future technology of 5G. For many years the top communications companies have been hard at work for every 1dB of system gain, so MagnaCom’s 10dB gain could be truly game changing.”
“I was initially skeptical that you could get such a quantum change,” said Cohen, who had recently left a senior position at Motorola Mobility when he met WAM inventor Amir Eliaz. “When Amir Eliaz showed me the technology he invented, and explained that you could get up to 10dB improvement, it was really unbelievable,” he said. “I spent about two months doing multiple cycles of due diligence with people that I consider experts in the industry that really understand the very deep mathematics behind it. When I was convinced that this technology indeed is groundbreaking we founded the company in 2012.”
The company, called MagnaCom, is preparing to demonstrate its technology at CES. Through a partnership with Altera, MagnaCom has created an FPGA implementation of WAM. Cohen expects it to generate significant interest, but he knows that MagnaCom is unlikely to win real customers until it can demonstrate WAM in hardware. He and Eliaz envision a one-millimeter square chipset which would be part of mobile devices. “It’s clearly non-cost prohibitive for companies to incorporate one square millimeter of cost,” said Cohen.
But upgrading mobile networks is of course much costlier, and a new wave modulation technique would require changes in the network as well as the devices. WAM is backward compatible with existing wireless technologies, meaning that a transition could theoretically happen over time, much like the current transition to LTE.
