Bluetooth low energy should contribute to WSN via remote monitoring

This is the concluding part of my discussion with Mike Foley, executive director, Bluetooth SIG, which looks at how the market for in-home wireless in smart energy will be developing in the years ahead, as well as the scope in wireless sensor networks (WSN).

Focus of Bluetooth Smart Energy Group
First, a bit about the focus of Bluetooth Smart Energy Group and what it has achieved so far.

The Smart Energy Study Group, includes major players like Emerson, and illustrates the Bluetooth SIG’s commitment to this market. The Study Group is working closely with other standards bodies to help define future global standards for smart energy and the products that form that ecosystem.

Foley said: “Within the next few years, your utility will start to replace your existing meters and you will be able to buy household appliances that can connect to your smart meter. The Bluetooth SIG is working with the industry to ensure that such a connection is cost effective, reliable and secure.

“Currently, Bluetooth is used around the world in smart energy applications — from simple energy monitors to complex mesh networks controlling solar arrays. With a ubiquitous presence in mobile phones, it also provides an ecosystem for controlling smart energy devices that users already own. The group has come together to make a strong case for Bluetooth in the smart energy market, and to push for next steps in this growing industry.”

Market for in-home wireless
Given this scenario, it will be interesting to survey how the market for in-home wireless in smart energy will be developing in the years ahead.

According to Foley, remote control and home automation have a bright future in the smart energy space. If Bluetooth is selected for the connectivity link to appliances, the integration of a smart ecosystem throughout the home will be significantly easier and faster. Once home appliances start to connect, they will likely also require their own wireless connections.

Zpryme Research has predicted that by 2015, 19.2 percent of washing machines, 17.4 percent of refrigerators and 17.3 percent of dryers sold in the US will include smart connections. Also, Whirlpool has publicly announced that by 2015, all of its electronically controlled appliances will be capable of receiving and responding to signals from smart grids.

Bluetooth set as short range wireless standard for smart energy!

Back in early 2003, I’d done a story with Anders Edlund, marketing director, EMEA of Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG). Those were the days when Bluetooth was just overcoming its teething problems. At that time, the SIG had unveiled a ‘five-minute ready’ program created to challenge and guide Bluetooth product developers and manufacturers in the Asia Pacific region to deliver devices that give consumers a “five-minute out-of-the-box experience.”

Mike Foley, executive director, Bluetooth SIG.

Fast forward to 2010! Nearly a fortnight ago, the Bluetooth SIG announced an enhanced focus on the needs of manufacturers of consumer devices in the smart grid environment. This effort, called Bluetooth Smart Energy, addresses the needs for wireless connections of sensors and actuators in the residence.

It is a great pleasure to hook up again with the Bluetooth SIG after quite a few years. Bluetooth as a technology, and Bluetooth SIG itself, have come a long way, very successfully, as well.

In the first part of a two-part discussion on Bluetooth Smart Energy, Mike Foley, executive director, Bluetooth SIG, discusses the rationale behind the Smart Energy effort, how it will benefit users, and whether it can stand up to possible challenges from other technologies.

May I also take this opportunity to thank Ms Jennifer Lopez, who made this possible, along with Starr Million Baker. Back to the story!

Rationale behind Bluetooth SIG’s Smart Energy effort
First, obviously, why the effort behind the Bluetooth SIG’s smart energy effort and why now!

According to Mike Foley, the smart energy market is a rapidly growing arena and one that the SIG is very interested in expanding its presence.

He said: “As different smart energy projects are planned, developed, and implemented, it is clear that there are different national requirements for each. However, there is an agreement that smart energy within the domestic environment will require the introduction of smart meters – and that is where we come in.

“These meters, which monitor and control our use of electricity, gas, and water, will need to provide real time information to consumers and interact in some form with energy consuming appliances. The interaction will take place with the help of short range wireless connections that are based on an existing standard.

“Bluetooth technology has proven itself to be a universally accepted wireless standard, implemented in a variety of use cases, and is now set to be established as the short range wireless standard for smart energy.”

Challenges from various technologies
Given the case that Bluetooth is positioned to be the short range standard for smart energy, how will it stand up to possible challenges from technologies such as ZigBee, RF4CE, Wi-Fi Direct, ANT, etc?

Foley said: “In my opinion, there is room for different types of technologies in this space. The one thing that has always set Bluetooth technology apart from competitive technologies is its ubiquity. Bluetooth technology is used in a variety of devices and is the go-to wireless standard for mobile phones, which are devices that could play a key role in remote energy monitoring.”

If utilities are going to adopt a short range wireless standard – why not adopt one that already has a presence in a number of key devices that users already own?

Bluetooth is by far the most successful of any of the short range wireless standards. It has been around for just over 10 years (twice as long as ZigBee) and outsells all of the other short range standards put together, with over 1 billion chips shipped every year.

“The very first Bluetooth products can still communicate with new ones that you buy today – something that neither 802.11 nor ZigBee can claim. Equally importantly, over the decade it has been shipping, it has evolved to address all of the key requirements of the smart energy market,” Foley added.

Infineon's wireless strategy focuses on low cost solutions and smartphones

Fairly recently, thanks to the great efforts of Infineon’s Abhinav Alok, I was able to meet up with Dr Matthias Ludwig, Head – Wireless for APAC and Infineon Korea and Peter Schaefer, VP & GM, Head – Microcontrollers, Infineon.

However, post the meeting, to my horror, I misplaced my notes and only managed to locate them last week. My apologies to Infineon for being late with this blog post.

I was able to discuss Infineon’s wireless strategy with Dr Ludwig and also managed a peek at Infineon’s range of microcontrollers during my discussion with Peter Schaefer. First, let’s have a look at the company’s wireless strategy.

Dr Matthias Ludwig said: “We are good in RF and baseband. There are about 1.5 billion RF transceivers out there globally, from Infineon.” He added that one third of the market falls in the low cost mobile phone segment.

Infineon’s wireless strategy is two fold — low cost solutions and the smartphone platform — where the company is focusing on the modem and the RF side, respectively. Infineon’s Android based smartphone platform uses an ARM 11 baseband. “Customers can come up with their own application processor,” Dr Ludwig said. “Our strategy gives us a lot of flexibility.”

He mentioned that Infineon receives a lot of requests from customers for smartphones at $100 solutions. “We believe that we can manage our single core Android platform in the $100 segment.”

Thanks to Dr Ludwig, I had a first hand experience of some of the smartphones that Infineon is currently working on. Actually, think about it! A $100 dollar (and even sub $100) smartphone may be just the thing Indians would love to have.

As for Infineon’s India strategy — part of the focus is on low cost. “We know that there is tough competition out there,” noted Dr. Ludwig. One other aspect that Infineon is focusing on is: how to develop and build an ecosystem in the country.

Of course, Infineon is also looking beyond the Indian market when it is developing solutions. In that respect, Dr Ludwig added that one of Infineon’s focus is to find the sweet spots that are not only of interest to India. “There is a certain drive to have low end products. Safety and reliability of the products are also important,” he concluded.

I will add a separate post on the conversation with Peter Schaefer, VP & GM, Head Microcontrollers, Infineon.

Welcome to PC's Telecom Blog!

Welcome to PC’s Telecom Blog (http://pctelecoms.blogspot.com)!

Hi friends, I’ve been thinking about adding a telecom blog to my network for a very long time! The reason being, I started my career in electronics and telecom back in 1989.

I had the privilege of being part of Asian Sources Telecom Products — a site, which I managed and built, with the help of my team and colleagues at Asian Sources Media, and later, Global Sources. Later, I moved on to Wireless Week, USA, as Asia Pacific Editor for the Asian Edition.

Back in India, I managed Convergence Plus for a short while, before launching four sites for CIOL in 2004 — Mobility, Networking, Storage and Security.

Given this background in telecommunications, it is apt for me to start a blog on this subject as well. Telecom has been my forte, and well, it is a subject that has also won me four awards in technology journalism, while at Global Sources.

Again, this blog has been spun out off my award winning blog! That blog remains unchanged, and will continue to carry top-quality, world class content!

This blogs will now include specific blog posts related to telecommunications, as well as press releases, industry updates, new products, features, statistics, etc. It will cover wireless, wireline, broadband, networking, optical networking, Test & Measurement, etc.

Thanks for your kind support as always. Suggestions for improvements are always welcome! 🙂

Can we expect exciting times in 2008?

Welcome 2008! May I wish all my readers a very happy and prosperous 2008. Another year’s gone past. We have a habit of looking back to see at what happened and what could have been.

A lot has been written already about 2007 and what to expect in 2008. So let’s just touch upon some of the events from 2007 and some expectations from 2008.

For India, 2007 was a great year for the semiconductor industry — first, the Indian government announced the semiconductor policy, followed some months later by the fab policy. Both were tremendous firsts in India’s science and technology, and not IT, history. Everyone hopes that the Indian semiconductor industry will take off this year. Eyes are focused on the embedded segment, what with the global semiconductor industry reportedly facing ‘an embedded dilemma.’

An issue hitting the EDA industry is that, the cost of designing or developing the embededded software for an SoC actually passed the cost of desgining the SoC itself in 2007. The world needs to avoid this software crisis, and India is well placed to take full advantage and play a major role, given its strength in embedded.

In IT, it’s been a mixed sort of a year for Apple, which hit big time with the iPhone, seemed not to make waves with either the Safari browser or the Leopard OS. Microsoft had the Vista OS, but then, Vista didn’t exactly warm the hearts of users or those who wished to upgrade their OS, including yours truly. Maybe, 2008 would ring in better times for Vista.

While on browsers, Firefox has gained lot of ground. However, by the end of 2007 came the news that the Netscape Web browser — which started it all — would soon be confined to history.

Netscape Navigator was the world’s first commercial Web browser and launch pad of the Internet boom. It will be taken off on February 1, 2008, after a 13-year run. Time Warner’s AOL, its current owner, has reportedly decided to kill further development and technical support to focus on growing the company as an advertising business. The first version of Netscape had come out in late 1994.

In gaming, there are admirers of Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360, and will remain the same. Which one of these gaming consoles will reign supreme, eventually, is difficult to predict.

In consumer electronics, lines are surely blurring between portable media players (PMPs) and portable navigation devices. Also, it would be interesting to see how digital photo frames survive 2008. A reported tight supply, especially for seven-inch models, has led to some makers in Asia either postponing mass production or extending lead times. Surely, makers cannot add more entertainment functions in smaller screen models, to keep costs down.

In the security products market, IP cameras and video servers should have a better year, with more emphasis now on video surveillance. In fact, some friends have been querying me as well regarding their potential.

On components, we can hope to see more growth for solid polymer capacitors in 2008, and among PCBs some fabricators should start manufacturing high-density interconnect (HDI) PCBs this year.

In wireless, we should witness TD-SCDMA in operation prior to the Beijing Olympic Games. Backers would like to see TD-SCDMA succeed, given the effort Datang-Siemens has made on the technology, as also the Chinese government, which issued spectrum for TD-SCDMA nearly five years ago!

Let’s all welcome 2008 and look forward to more exciting things happening.

Convergence driving technology trends, says Sasken chief

Sasken Technolgies was earlier known as SAS and it was focusing on product development. Later, it moved on to services. Speaking about this shift, Rajiv C. Mody, chairman and CEO, said that Sasken has always been, from day one, working on both simultaneously.

Sasken initially started out in the EDA space and had one product in the simulation space. It was writing a simulator, addressing large complex designs and methods to simplify the designs. Simultaneously, Sasken was also doing a lot of services for large telecom companies in the areas of designing. This was continued and eventually, Sasken expanded in the area of telecommunications.

Subsequently, Sasken started building products in the telecom space. However, one significant difference is that anything that it does, it impacts Sasken’s customers’ top line as Sasken address the R&D side of the business.

Not so long back, Sasken were also a VLSI player. It decided to disband the design tool part of the business and focus completely on communications. Now, Sasken does a lot of business in chip design, which is part of VLSI. Today, it is among the leading providers of semiconductor design, working on all kinds of complex system-on-chip (SoC), as well as 65nm design.

Sasken has filed for 39 patents so far, of which 16 have been granted. Those remaining are in the process, and typically, once a patent has been applied for, it takes four years before being granted.

It has invested close to Rs 40 crore in R&D in 2007. In the first two quarters of this financial year, it has invested about Rs 15 corers in R&D. Sasken focuses on next-generation technologies, which would shape up the way things are to come in this new, converged world.

Mody said: “The fundamental thing driving this entire change is convergence — essentially entertainment, media, news, information — all of it being available at push medium as well as pull medium. Wireless is also playing a very significant role.”

All of these combinations are creating newer opportunities – starting with, say, for example, in the service provider-side, new billing methods have to be put in place because it’s going to be triple- and quad-play kinds of situations.

Simultaneously, on the handset side, with more and more computing power being made available, newer kinds of applications have started playing significant role. As a result, Sasken is now scanning the entire gamut to position itself and take advantage.

Sasken will continue to invest in products in the mobile handset space. It also has a significant role to play on the multimedia and the application frameworks. Mody added: “To give you an idea, for the mobile handset, direct broadcast is going to play a significant role. People are already talking about high definition (HD) on mobile. You will see all those kinds of interesting things coming about, and we will participate.”

Sasken had also acquired a Finnish firm. This acquisition has worked extremely well and its full integration has been done. Mody said: “We have significant engagements because of our presence in Finland and the capabilities that they bring, not only with the existing, but also with the new costumer base. We are thriving and this has given us the capability to do full end-to-end handset design and testing.”

Cogs in the wheel

In engineering, it is imperative that all cogs of the wheel come together, so that the wheel rolls smoothly. Similarly, it is imperative that all key IT processes in an organization gel together and work as one.

Imagine the nightmare that enterprises, small and large, would have to go through should this did not happen!

The first basic IT asset is your company’s network, or the intranet. We have seen several times that a company’s network’s down for some reason and mails can’t be sent or received.

In such cases, the organizations or the enterprises who are ‘stuck’ with this situation, are literally crippled. Mails can’t be received, mails can’t be sent out, important mails are missed, business-critical processes are waylaid, and so on and so forth. I’ve been part of this nightmare several times.

Once, the undersea cable snapped during my stay in a company. I don’t need to add the problem we had to face for at least half a day, as service providers worked furiously to rectify the cable and restore normal service.

Some advocate satellite as the best medium for managing data transmission. Maybe! Some others cite wireless. Perhaps!! Then, I hear from many that there are issues related with security and storage. However, those would only come into play once your basic network is operational smoothly.

In telecom, they have something called five nines, or 99.9999, which means the network is up and running for this percentage of time! You’ve noticed how people go beserk and start cursing their phones or the network, should they fail to receive a network, or are unable to connect to the network!

What they don’t know or realize is the hard work that’s involved in setting up, maintaining and operating a network! It’s similar to what sometimes happens in offices when the network breaks down and we are unable to send/receive mails.

Maybe, it would be prudent to first manage the internal network as best as possible, before moving on to bigger, better things. The cogs in the wheel got to move smoothly.