GEDC Industry Advisory Board Keynote Speakers Discuss RF Issues for Next-Generation Technologies

Understanding and capitalizing on the physics of the RF bandwidth is driving the creation of new products as well as new applications and performance enhancements for existing products. Keynote speakers at the April 2005 meeting of the GEDC Industry Advisory Board described how their companies are addressing technological challenges and creating new products.

The semi-annual IAB meeting provides a platform for industry/student/faculty interactions on recent research done at the Center.

New MTS Technology from Cingular

"We're in the process of testing and deploying a new MTS technology," said Kristin S. Rinne, chief technology officer for Cingular Wireless in Atlanta. "Related to that is high-speed downlink packet access, which would increase the downlink - meaning from the network to the customers Ð to speeds up to a theoretical peak rate of 14.4 mbps, though the actual user experience with mobility would probably be more in the 400-to-700 kbps range."

A year or two down the road, Rinne envisions further improvements to uplink speed and "continuous improvement on latency and the end-to-end turnaround time as well."

RF technology enables more efficient throughput in terms of existing applications, Rinne added, citing e-mail and sales force automation systems as examples. But high-speed access to the enterprise applications will also enable new capabilities such as video sharing.

"Your real estate agent could show you over a device all the new homes in a certain area, or a claims adjuster could transmit images and data from the field back to the home office," she said.

Role of CMOS, MEMS at Intel

Stewart S. Taylor, a principal design engineer at Intel, sees new developments arising from complementary metal oxide semiconductors (CMOS). While CMOS is not itself an emerging technology, according to Taylor, radio architecture, baseband processing and certain circuit approaches are emerging that will facilitate a new class of radios with high performance, small size and low cost.

"Packaging, passive networks, filters and switches are also critically important," he added. "As radios become small and inexpensive, the cost and size will probably be limited by the RF front end. MEMS technology will play an important role in filters, passive networks, and switching. Smart antennas will improve radio performance while tunable antennas will reduce size. All of this will facilitate low-cost MIMO systems, cognitive radios and multi-standard radios."

Consumer RF from TI

On the mass-market, consumer side, RF is already at work in applications as seemingly diverse as "smart" ignition keys and wireless bar-code scanners. And the list is growing. Gregg A. Lowe, senior vice president-high-performance analog with Texas Instruments, sees a demographic basis for new markets and applications for RF and other electronic devices.

"The Baby Boomers are entering retirement, a time when medical considerations come into play," he said. "That means there is going to be a huge market for embedded electronic devices in the biomedical field Ð heart monitors, pacemakers, embedded insulin-delivery systems and so forth."

The scope of RF-enabled applications will make it easier to develop products tailored to a specific customer segment, added Lowe, noting that China is rising market for consumer electronic products. "And what a Chinese customer wants is probably going to be a little different from what someone in, say, Germany wants."

While avoiding the temptation to make specific predictions, Lowe observed that the universal key to customer acceptance "is all about whether or not these technologies make life more interesting, convenient and more efficient."

University Centers are Key

No matter which directions the RF market moves into over the coming years, it is certain that university-based research and test facilities such as the Georgia Electronic Design Center (GEDC) will continue to play a pivotal role in pointing the way.

"From the relationships we have with Georgia Tech, and also with some other universities, we're seeing some good research that may be applied to either the technology or applications," Rinne said.

Taylor agreed, noting that universities have historically served as fertile grounds for new ideas. "The GEDC will play a huge role because of the strength of its multidisciplinary team and state-of-the-art facilities."