The History of Prescient Wireless, Incorporated
Prescient Wireless was formed in June of 2006 by a team of engineers seeking to put their many years of engineering experience in the development of cellular base stations for a major original equipment manufacturer (OEM) to use on a broader scale. Our initial product was the world’s first 4G WiMAX, IEEE 802.16e compliant cellular base station product which was well received by the market. Our customers included several cellular OEMs, an industry leading test equipment manufacturer and the major WiMAX chip supplier.
Beginning in 2007, Prescient Wireless developed a state od the art Doherty power amplifier for a device supplier utilizing their GaN (gallium nitride) power devices. Since then, Prescient Wireless has developed a wide variety of Doherty power amplifiers for the cellular base station market. This includes amplifiers that utilize both LDMOS (laterally diffused metal oxide semiconductor) and GaN (gallium nitride) power devices. We have gone on to develop power amplifiers and low noise amplifiers for both device suppliers as well as cellular base station OEMs. Prescient Wireless continues to this day to develop leading edge RF solutions for many clients on a regular basis.
In late 2007, Prescient Wireless expanded on its communications expertise by developing a radio transceiver solution that included transponder, distance measuring equipment (DME) and traffic collision avoidance system (TCAS) functions. Our engineering team was able to utilize their extensive background in high volume, state of the art radio transceiver design to develop a radio solution that was very highly integrated, compact with low weight and low power consumption that pushed the envelope for avionics equipment design.
In 2008, Prescient Wireless developed an extremely high performance direct sampled receiver for a special surveillance application. The receiver utilized state of the art analog to digital converters (ADCs) and track and hold amplifiers to directly convert the 2-4GHz frequency band directly to baseband data. This project enabled our OEM client to demonstrate break through system performance in a sea trial and contributed significantly to their winning of a major government contract.
In 2009, Prescient Wireless was contracted to develop a power amplifier for a special application in the ISM band. Operating at 2450MHz, the amplifier delivered 140 Watts of RF power and has had a multiyear track record of exceptional reliability. Prescient Wireless has since developed other RF solutions for the same system and continues today to manufacture and supply these RF subsystems to our client.
Throughout 2010 and 2011, Prescient Wireless developed a number of highly advanced ground based radar subsystems for a major OEM client. This included a 1000W EIRP transmitter operating in the 2.7 to 2.9GHz band that is capable of precisely timing transmissions to within a few nanoseconds of a system clock. Also developed by Prescient Wireless was a multiband, 978MHz (UAT), 1030MHz and 1090MHz receiver that is capable of generating precise time stamps based on the time of arrival (TOA) of received messages.
Beginning in 2011, Prescient Wireless began the development of several test and measurement and industrial products. The first of these was a handheld test and measurement device that required a high performance but very low cost, wide bandwidth transmitter and receiver. The device operated from 10MHz to 1GHz and measured such parameters as insertion loss, return loss and isolation of a multiconductor cable. Prescient Wireless also developed an RFID product that involved antenna design as well as low cost RF switching. Another product developed during this time period was an ultracapacitor based industrial power backup system.
In 2013, Prescient Wireless developed all of the hardware for a large scale industrial sensor system. This project required thousands of highly sensitive detectors that could time stamp detection events with an accuracy of a few nanoseconds relative to a system clock. The design included a high voltage power supply, a very low noise current detector along with a FPGA board with an embedded controller.
In 2014 and 2015, Prescient Wireless was contracted by a major cellular OEM to develop Doherty power amplifiers and low noise amplifiers for their latest microcells. Prescient Wireless engineers were also involved in the CPLD and FPGA design that included baseband processing, CPRI link, RSSI processing and control for the cellular base station. During this period, Prescient Wireless was also contracted to develop a low cost, high quality wireless communication system for use in the fast food restaurant industry.
Prescient Wireless continues to expand into new areas of electronics design, utilizing the engineering team’s extensive background in multiple disciplines to provide state of the art products for our clients.