Tropian was formed to design radio transmitters “backwards”. The usual method is to do a linear design and then work to find ways to make it as energy efficient as possible. Instead, Tropian began with the highest energy efficient circuitry possible (a switch) and found ways to make it provide all signal types. This resulted in our adopting Polar Modulation techniques, focused on Direct Polar modulation instead of polar loop or small-signal polar approaches.

Tropian focused on multimode cellular mobile products. The multimode design supports the signals for AMPS, NADC, GSM, GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, WLAN, and Bluetooth. Without trying, we found that our polar modulation technology met the fundamental requirements for Software Defined Radio (SDR).

Tropian won the following awards:

2000: Communication Systems Design “The Comets”
2001: Frost & Sullivan “Market Engineering Technology Leadership”
2001: Red Herring “These 100 Companies Still Matter”

Tropian was acquired by Panasonic in April 2006 and continues on as the Panasonic Wireless Research Laboratory.