Sarantel - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Sarantel (AIM: SLG) is a Wellingborough

Wellingborough

Wellingborough is a market town and borough in Northamptonshire, England, situated some from the county town of Northampton. The town is situated on the north side of the River Nene, most of the older town is sited on the flanks of the hills above the river's current flood plain...

, UK-based manufacturer of miniature low-proximity antennas used in cell phones, PDA

PDA

A PDA is most commonly a Personal digital assistant, also known as a Personal data assistant, a mobile electronic device.PDA may also refer to:In science, medicine and technology:...

s, GPS, and other communication devices. The company has offices in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

and the US. Sarantel is listed on the London Stock Exchange

London Stock Exchange

The London Stock Exchange is a stock exchange located in the City of London within the United Kingdom. , the Exchange had a market capitalisation of US$3.7495 trillion, making it the fourth-largest stock exchange in the world by this measurement...

in the Alternative Investment Market

Alternative Investment Market

AIM is a sub-market of the London Stock Exchange, allowing smaller companies to float shares with a more flexible regulatory system than is applicable to the main market....

(SLG.L).

Company history

Sarantel is a spin-off of Symmetricom

Symmetricom

Symmetricom, Inc. develops, manufactures, and supplies timekeeping technology to customers in industry and government worldwide that require extremely precise synchronization...

founded in 2000 by Dr. Leisten. Leisten was spearheading the development of a new type of miniature antenna

Antenna (radio)

An antenna is an electrical device which converts electric currents into radio waves, and vice versa. It is usually used with a radio transmitter or radio receiver...

– now called PowerHelix - since the 1990s at Navstar Systems Ltd. Navstar was acquired by Symmetricom in 1993. During 1999 and 2000 Symmetricom enacted a strategy to focus on their core business of designing and manufacturing timing and network synchronization technology. They offered Dr. Leisten an opportunity to do a management buy out of the miniature antenna technology they acquired from Navstar.

Leisten took advantage of the offer and founded Sarantel and the company started trading on 29 September 2000 with first-round funding of approximately $10 million from 3i and Foresight Venture Partners. Further private funding rounds involved 3i, MTI, Foresight Venture Partners, Trivest, E Technologies and Hotbed In 2004 the European Tech Tour identified Sarantel as one of the Top 25 high growth technology companies in the UK. In March 2005 Sarantel floated on the London Stock Exchange's AIM market and in August 2005 Sarantel shipped its one-millionth antenna.

Intellectual property

Sarantel has developed an intellectual property portfolio comprising over two dozen core patents with hundreds of international filings on the design and production of dielectrically loaded antennas.

Products and services

Sarantel’s antenna products are used in a broad range of GPS, satellite radio, military and satellite phone applications (see Applications).

The company’s primary focus is on designing and manufacturing patented dielectrically loaded antenna technology, this technology is specifically aimed at hand held devices which are mostly used close to human bodies. By off setting the antenna tuning to factor in the near-field interference caused by the water in the human body, Sarantel claims to reduce the impact of ‘body loading’ often associated with conventional antenna technologies. This however has the side effect of making the Helix type antennas less suitable for use in free space applications where a large watery body is not nearby.

Their R&D efforts are mostly focused on reducing near-field interference to improve the range and quality of wireless communications.

Technology

Sarantel’s PowerHelix antenna technology is the commercialization of 20 years of research in balancing electric fields across a dielectric-core. Their technology enables dense electro-magnetic near-fields to be stored in a low-loss dielectric material. This approach reduces the amount of close-range electromagnetic energy that a user of a cell phone, GPS or other mobile technology is exposed to.
Sarantel’s technology is geared towards applications of wireless antenna’s with “in-use” conditions where match and gain characteristics do not vary with changing use scenarios and towards applications that experience significant near-field interference.

In certain applications, antennas for wireless products that are used close to the human body should be designed resonating independently from the wireless product. This approach reduces the interference from human bodies called ‘body loading’ by removing the regions of high electro-magnetic field density from the areas that are occupied by human tissues when the wireless product is “in use”. This method reduces the aperture size of the antenna and achieves a higher degree of electrical stability in the presence of the human body. It also reduces in-band “common-mode” noise from conducted power on the device chassis so that the approach also enables integration of multiple radios into a smaller device with reduced interference.

Sarantel’s topology and feed system is designed to provide electromagnetic isolation, rather than to resonate with the box as is the case with most conventional antennas.

Sarantel also provides MIMO solutions for mobile WiMax, 3G-LTE and WiFi IEEE801.11n where high data throughput and range depend on the isolation between the multiplicity of receiving and transmitting antennas on the box.

The manufacturing process

Sarantel has manufactured their own products since the company’s formation in 2000 using a highly accurate three dimensional photolithography process.

In 2008, the company finalized the development of its 3rd generation production process. With each generation the company improves scalability of the process and lowers the cost of production.

Applications

Sarantel’s antennas exist inside the following types of applications: