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Jack Shandle
Site Editor, Wireless Net DesignLine
TechOnline
For wireless communications, 2007 will be the best of times—and possibly the worst of times.
On the positive side, everything seems to be going wireless.
- On the factory floor, ZigBee and competing protocols seem to be making headway at last.
- In the home and office, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Wireless UWB, and ZigBee aim to unplug just about everything.
- In the wide open spaces, cellular, WiMAX and Wi-Fi all have ambitious "coexistence" plans followed by market dominance plans.
There has to be a downside to all this uncontrolled activity and presumed acceptance of wireless as the communications technology of choice. But the list of negatives has to be qualified by the question: For whom?
- For consumers, the number of choices will begin to become staggering. Things that are supposed interoperate won't. Things that are supposed to be more convenient will be less.
- For small and even medium sized business, 2007 will be the year when they place their bets (i.e. bet their companies) on a technology and hope it rises to dominance in its niche. WiMAX is probably the best example here.
- For the folks participating standards-making committees, 2007 will be a year of unremitting travel: Hours and hours in security lines at airports and innumerable bottles of fluids confiscated.
- For design engineers, multimode will be the call to arms. Trying to design as many as seven radios into a space the size of a matchbox will become an unending agony—very often followed by product release ecstasy. But then that is what design engineering is all about, isn't it?
Technologies to Watch
While there are certainly going to be advances in wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi as the IEEE 802.11n standards nears completion, let's take a look at technologies that might be regarded by some as "sleepers" but have the potential to be blockbusters in 2007.
Software-Defined Radio (SDR)
I'm putting SDR at the top of my up-and-coming technology list because technology is still mostly what it is, as opposed to a fully productized, standardized entity, which we also tend to call—incorrectly—a technology.
Multimode is the reason that SDR has a future. Or, as a design engineer might say, "So many radios and so little space on the motherboard." The future may not be as bring as some suppose, however, because sometimes those Bluetooth, cellular and Wi-Fi radios all want to operate at the same time. Not an unsolvable problem for SDR but a very complicated one.
For more about SDR, check out the SDR Forum's web site at www.sdrforum.org.
RFID
At the other end of the production spectrum from SDR is RFID (RF Identification). By that I mean simply that instead of being a nascent technology like SDR, RFID is a very mature technology that has proven itself in many applications already.
The reason that RFID will be big in 2007 can be summed up in two seemingly unrelated words: Wal-Mart and medicine. Together, they add up to a sharp spike in product deployments and opportunities for smart design engineers to invent application-specific hardware and software.
Regarding Wal-Mart and medicine: To be brief, Wal-Mart is adopting RFID and showing unbelievably good returns on its technology investment. Where Wal-Mart goes, other retailers must follow.
On the medication front, look for initial rollouts of RFID systems that can track prescriptions from the factory to the consumer's medicine cabinet. I will leave it to you to figure out how many prescription bottles that is.
More information about RFID is available at AIM Global, an RFID industry association.
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