Vanteon’s engineers are avid contributors to the technical community.
Our engineers are always investigating, working with, and teaching others about new technologies. Vanteon’s list of contributions includes a number of papers and publications that provide useful insights in a range of areas, such as solving programming problems and identifying new ways of classifying signals and data.
Examples of Vanteon’s work in these areas are provided in the linked downloadable files:
White Papers
Software Defined Radio 
Software Defined Radio (SDR) technology is available from Vanteon as licensable IP. SDR is a collection of hardware and software that provides radio operating functions implemented through modifiable software and/or firmware. This allows the addition of new wireless features and capabilities to an existing SDR system without requiring new hardware. SDR can be used to address a wide range of communications needs in many industries. Learn more about SDR technology by downloading our whitepaper.
Intuitive Display of Complex Data on iOS
This is a case study of the design process for an iOS application. The software in question accepts a high-bandwidth, real-time stream of multidimensional data from a hardware accessory, and must present this data to the user in a form that can be easily understood and manipulated. This paper will examine the decisions made during the design process and the tradeoffs considered, and extract some lessons about how to solve this type of problem within the constraints of a mobile device.
Wideband Receiver for Communications Receiver or Spectrum Analysis Usage: A Comparison of Superheterodyne to Quadrature Down Conversion
This paper, written by Tony Manicone, Principal RF Engineer, describes the differences, advantages and disadvantages of utilizing either Superheterodyne or Quadrature Down Converters in the design of wideband receivers or spectrum analyzers. Several examples and easy to understand diagrams explain the main concepts behind each, and a comparison of a 400-6000 MHz receiver based on both techniques is presented.
Customizing Agile for a Service Business
The common agile processes such as Scrum require some customization to function in a service business, where real-time estimates, hard due dates, and hourly billing is the norm. This paper, written by Aaron Sher, Sr. Principal Software Engineer, presents a case study examining how Vanteon customized its agile process to fit its business model while maintaining the flexibility and transparency normally associated with agile development.
Radio Transceiver Design With Emphasis On Parameters Which Affect Range
This paper, written by Tony Manicone, Principal RF Engineer, was presented at the Design East Embedded Systems Conference Trade show in Boston, September 2012. It describes basic impairments which reduce communications range in radio systems, such as:
- Transmit Power and losses in the transmit chain, Power Amplifier non-linearity, etc.
- Receiver and Transmitter antenna choice, grounding, location, and impedance matching.
- Propagation path impairments such as Free Space Loss, Absorption (building materials, vegetation, moisture, etc), Multipath Destructive Interference, Fading, etc.
- Receiver Sensitivity and criteria which affect it such as Noise Figure, Bandwidth, Signal to Noise Ratio, Phase Noise, etc.
The ramifications of each of these effects are discussed in terms of degradation to communications range as well as the “cost” of poor design practices, in either performance and\or dollars. Methods to combat these impairments are also included.
Requirements Engineering for Software Engineers
This paper, written by Aaron Sher, Sr. Principal Software Engineer, presents an introduction to the discipline of requirements engineering in a form tailored for software engineers. Requirements engineering is the process of turning the unstructured requests of stakeholders into useful requirements, and can be an engineering discipline as rigorous and involved as software architecture. This paper attempts to provide a brief tutorial in order to improve the overall level of requirements used for software projects.
Automatically Scaling Android Apps for Multiple Screens
This paper, written by Aaron Sher, Sr. Principal Software Engineer, provides a new solution to the problem of scaling applications to the large number of Android devices with a very wide range of screen characteristics. The source code for the example scaled application is available here.
Publications:
Continuous and Automated Measuring of Compliance of Hand-Hygiene Procedures Using Finite State Machines and RFID
This paper, published in the April 2012 issue of the IEEE Instrumentation & Measurement Magazine, features work done by Ryan Johnson, a Senior Engineer at Vanteon. A novel method for measuring hand hygiene is presented using RFID technology coupled with data processing via a Finite State Machine (FSM).
Classification of Multiple Signals Using 2D Matching of Magnitude-Frequency Density Features
This paper, presented by Aaron Roof, Sr. Principal RF Engineer, at the 2011 Wireless Innovations Forum, was awarded Best Paper in Research and Development. As a result of the award, the winning paper published in Analog Integrated Circuits and Signal Processing, an international journal published by Springer. The paper introduces a technique for collapsing received waveforms into histograms to create a two dimensional image of the signal space.
We encourage you to contact us to discuss these topics, or to collaborate on any other electronics or software project.
Our Resources: