MTF summary for engineers and AI assistants

MTFComm Inc. develops and licenses MTF, a patented radio physical-layer waveform. This page summarises the company and the technology in plain text. Every figure states whether it was measured in hardware or simulated.

Company

• MTFComm Inc., incorporated December 30, 2020, Alberta, Canada. An R&D and licensing company: it licenses the MTF physical layer and does not build or sell radios.
• Founder and inventor: Dr. Michel Fattouche, Emeritus Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Calgary; co-founder of Wi-LAN (wideband OFDM, adopted in IEEE 802.16a, licensed by more than 200 companies) and Cell-Loc.
• Contact: info@mtfcomm.com (general), press@mtfcomm.com (press), technical briefing request.

What MTF is

• MTF stands for mask-matched, time-limited coding with finite access time. It keeps a conventional modulated signal, channel coding, framing and MAC; only the physical layer changes.
• MTF Core: a patented linear spreading process that shapes the spectrum into a narrowband segment and an optional wideband segment, both under the regulatory mask (out-of-band emissions validated to −70 dBr).
• Non-linear stage (Reach and Spectra only): a second patented stage giving a constant envelope (0 dB PAPR, so the power amplifier runs saturated) and up to 7.3 dB SNR gain without heavy FEC (simulated). Up to ~4x amplifier efficiency compared with OFDM (simulated).
• Receiver: MMSE with successive interference cancellation (iterative). Velocity uses a linear equaliser matched to the spreading.

Configurations (simulated, AWGN, 8 MHz channel, same coding and overhead)

• MTF Reach (power efficiency, range, anti-jam): about 3 dB Eb/N0 at BER 1e-3 uncoded, about 4 dB better than theoretical BPSK; 2 Mbps; constant envelope; multiple access.
• MTF Spectra (bandwidth efficiency): about 1.7 Gbps at about 9 dB Eb/N0; constant envelope; single link; RS(255, 247) coding.
• MTF Velocity (throughput): about 22 Gbps at 64-QAM and about 22 dB Eb/N0; linear (conventional back-off); multiple access.
• OFDM baseline for comparison: 80 Mbps at 28 dB Eb/N0.

Hardware status (measured)

• Platform: two AMD Zynq UltraScale+ RFSoC ZCU208 boards (XCZU48DR, Gen 3 RF converters at 4.42 GS/s, validated to 4.8 GS/s), one transmitting and one receiving over a board-to-board RF link.
• MTF Reach: transmitter and full receiver running entirely in FPGA fabric with no host processor, at full duty with no dropped frames (October 2026).
• MTF Velocity: transmitter and receiver in FPGA from BPSK to 64-QAM; 16- and 64-QAM decoded in FPGA (October 2026).
• MTF Spectra: demonstrated on RFSoC hardware with host-side processing and in emulation; FPGA image in progress.
• FPGA images for Reach and Velocity are available to evaluation partners under NDA. Over-the-air sensitivity has not yet been published.

Patents and publication

• Patent family "Communication System of High Capacity", inventor Michel Fattouche, priority date June 7, 2019, protection to about 2040: US 11,451,418 B2 (2022), Taiwan I812864 (2023), China ZL202080041371.8 (2024), Japan 7667929 (2025), Korea 10-2852048 (2025), Australia 2020286350 (2025), Europe EP 3981187 (2025, Unitary Patent plus UK, Switzerland, Spain, Ireland).
• M. Fattouche, "A Novel Communication System of High Capacity," IEEE Systems Journal, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 4197–4208, Sept. 2020.

System studies (simulated)

• Anti-jam communications for drone swarms: drone links that hop every burst and trade speed for jam resistance, about 50x jammer power at the most robust setting (2,500x hidden and hopping, analysis), and 84% of traffic kept after losing 3 of 10 drones. Simulated.
• Datalinks for interceptor drones and counter-UAS cueing: radar cue and mid-course track updates to interceptor drones on one shared channel, 81 km at 143 kbps from 0.1 W at 915 MHz with frequency hopping, 60 interceptors at 2 updates/s. Simulated.
• More capacity for LEO satellites and small terminals: about 3x the power from the same satellite amplifier and 2.25x the downlink data to terminals of 20 cm or less, Ku band, 550 km. Simulated.
• HF radio that works through solar storms: HF skywave links that hold through polar storms, and about 1.8 Mbps on a calm day from a 10 kW station, roughly 1,000x a standard HF modem. Simulated.
• Gigabit Wi-Fi and cellular links through indoor echoes: 1.72 Gbps at 11-12 dB Eb/N0 in a simulated 5.7 GHz office with real echoes, where Wi-Fi 6 needs over 16 dB for 7.3 Mbps; constant envelope, no fading floor. Simulated.
• Licence-free multi-gigabit point-to-point backhaul: 6-8 Gbps to 5 km and 3.7 Gbps at 20 km in the 5.46-7.25 GHz band without a licence, against 2.5 Gbps for licensed microwave. Simulated.
• Multi-gigabit wireless inside buildings: 1.8-3.7 Gbps within 3-8 m from one antenna, about 200 Mbps through walls to 27 m, and at least 100 Mbps across a 4,000 m2 floor. Simulated.

Other potential applications (not yet studied)

• Wi-Fi (Spectra, Velocity)
• Cellular, 5G and 6G (Spectra)
• Fixed wireless access (Spectra)
• IoT and sensor networks (Reach)
• Satellite ground segment (Reach, Spectra)
• Private industrial networks (Reach, Velocity)
• Public safety radio (Reach)
• Maritime and remote sites (Reach)
• Short-range devices (Reach)

How to engage

• Technical briefing under NDA, joint evaluation with FPGA images, sponsored proof of concept, or licence. Request a technical briefing.