People communicating with other people

10 years ago very few people owned a cellular ("cell") phone. What was available was a "car" or "mobile phone" that was basically nothing more than a radio transmitter-receiver. It had the shape of a brick, the weight of a brick, and the intelligence of a brick. Today cell-phones are everywhere, allowing the caller to reach a person instead of a location. The intelligence of a cell-phone is based upon several "chips" inside the phone tuned to a different frequency which allow the phone to tune to different "cells" or transmission towers, this is called "handshaking". IBM research has recently contributed to a major breakthrough for telecommunications with the Silicon Germanium Chip or SiGe. With SiGe, IBM tackles a new generation of wireless communications and data-conversion components, with application to products such as:

• Inexpensive 24 GHz Collision Warning radar systems for mainstream automobiles.
• 1.8 GHz and beyond wireless voice and data phone systems on a single chip.
• High-speed A/D and D/A converters for data acquisition, direct-to-baseband radio receivers, signal synthesis, and more.
• Low-cost, reliable Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receivers.
• Other innovative high-frequency products as the imagination and market evolve.