Northern Ireland’s reputation for designing and developing cutting edge technologies has been bolstered by the formation of AntennaWare, a deep tech start-up that is already revolutionising the wireless wearable market.
Headed by academics Dr Matthew Magill and Dr Gareth Conway, AntennaWare was founded in 2021 after spinning out from Queen’s University Belfast with funding from Techstart and QUBIS. The technology behind the company had already won the electronics category in the 2020 Catalyst INVENT awards.
The culmination of Dr. Magill and Dr. Conway’s 17 years of academic research into wearable antenna design and body-centric electromagnetic (EM) propagation, AntennaWare is the only commercial company that is designing antennas with the unique challenges of wearables in mind.
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Dr. Magill said: “We’ve faced a lot of challenges starting a hardware company during the pandemic, but we’ve fully developed our technology and we’re seeing great traction as we’re yet to find anyone in the markets we’re targeting who doesn’t face this problem in some form”.
Previously a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast, Dr. Magill has worked in the wireless industry on various antenna designs for wearable and IoT products. He has a Ph.D in antenna design and electromagnetic propagation for body-centric wireless communications, has published in top academic and industry journals, and is a named inventor on several patents. Dr. Conway, a senior lecturer in wireless communications at Queens University, is also internationally acclaimed for his research in Antennas and Propagation, which has won national and global awards.
Body shadowing is a problem caused by the human body blocking the wireless transmission path. This can result in unwanted signal dropouts because the radio waves created by existing antennas are reflected or absorbed by the body.
Dr. Magill explains: “As the wearer moves around, their body blocks the signal path between the device they’re wearing and other device they’re trying to communicate with. This might be another device on their body, or it might be a remote device. In both scenarios the result can be severely reduced communication ranges that present major issues in wireless audio and medical, sports and industrial IoT applications.”
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AntennaWare is involved with companies in a wide range of applications including wireless audio headphones and microphones, sports IoT remote monitoring systems, lone worker safety devices and VR. Its expertise has already been deployed in the 2.4GHz frequency band for the Bluetooth arena where its Bodywave™ antenna resulted in improvements of between 10 and 20dB.
It recently launched a new Ultra Wide Band(UWB) radio version, which is recording over 25dB improvement in link budget when compared to printed or ceramic chip antennas. This is so dramatic that it is allowing UWB radios to successfully address market sectors where Body Blocking was previously difficult to overcome.
Source: Written from press release
