Ultra-low-power wireless makes inroads into many applications
Low-power and ultra-low-power wireless devices continue to improve our 'quality of experience' in life, by giving us peace of mind, convenience, and new forms of entertainment.
Janine Love, Editor, EE Times' RF/Microwave Designline -- EDN, December 12, 2011
We hear these things all the time: Our population is aging, and we need more medical care alternatives. Social networking is thriving, and people want creative new ways to communicate with their friends. Home automation and security is a market ripe for new innovations. People want to exercise more, but need more motivation to do so.Enter low-power and ultra-low-power wireless. Once the insignificant step children of the wireless world, lower-power wireless technologies are hot, and they are making inroads into all of these applications. With the new iPhone 4S sporting a Bluetooth v4.0 chip, which can communicate with Bluetooth low-energy chips, you can bet that the general public will soon start to take notice.
There are really two categories of lower-power wireless technologies: low-power wireless (such as ZigBee (www.zigbee.org) and Bluetooth v4.0) and ultra-low-power wireless (e.g., Bluetooth Smart, ANT and solutions from companies like Nordic Semiconductor). The major difference is that low-power wireless has an average power consumption in milliamps while the average power consumption of ultra-low-power wireless is measured in microamps, allowing it to run from coin cell batteries. Low-power wireless is already fairly well established (e.g., the ZigBee Alliance claims “millions of implementations”) targeting applications such as smart metering. So, I think the really interesting activity for 2012 will be in the field of ultra-low power technologies.
ANT Wireless (www.thisisant.com) proprietary ultra-low-power wireless technology, ANT+, has made it the market leader in sports and fitness equipment. The company already has its technology in smartphones, most notably several models from Sony Ericsson. ANT has shipped about 16 million devices to date, and the market for ANT ICs in sports, fitness, and health sensors is expected to triple between 2010 and 2015, according to IMS Research, despite the entry into the market of Bluetooth low energy. Existing products already include monitors for blood glucose, physical activity, and blood pressure.
The Bluetooth SIG (www.bluetooth.com) keeps its eye firmly fixed on the prizes in the market. Bluetooth version 4.0 includes a specification for low-energy functionality, and it is positioning itself to take the ultra-low-power wireless market by storm. (After a series of monikers, we are now to refer to these devices as 'Bluetooth Smart.’) For the moment, Bluetooth Smart is still lagging behind more established low-power technologies, such as ANT, in terms of profiles that can be used to build actual devices. But the Bluetooth design ecosystem is huge, and this giant is on the move. Early products are set to include health and medical devices and 3D TV glasses. We should look for many more innovations to come out of this technology.
Nordic Semiconductor (www.nordicsemi.com) is by all rights a "pioneer" in ultra-low-power wireless, offering chips for ANT, Bluetooth low energy, and its own proprietary 2.4GHz and sub-1GHz RF solutions that can impressively operate from coin cell batteries (see Figure). Nordic has manufactured several generations of its ultra-low-power chips, and appears to be strengthening its specialized stronghold in the market. Stretching out from being a provider of the network processor chip for low-power links, Texas Instruments (www.ti.com) has also recently released radio chips for ANT and Bluetooth low energy.
Nordic's ultra-low power RF solutions enable its customers to build wireless connectivity into everything from gaming headsets from Emotiv (a) to tooth polishers from Discus Dental (b).
A 'renegade' group at Dialog Semiconductor (www.dialog-semiconductor.com) is working to deploy DECT in the low-power market. DECT is an old standard that was originally developed for business phones (I still remember seeing the prototypes in the labs in the late 1990s). It has its own dedicated spectrum (so, low interference); it supports star, mesh, and tree network configurations, and it can integrate voice and data functions on the same hardware. To create the "low power" version of DECT, engineers simply added fast switching to the devices, making a "deep sleep" mode possible. I think this technology has a lot of potential, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.
In the meantime, we can expect 2012 to be the year when low-power and ultra low power wireless devices continue to improve our 'quality of experience' in life, by giving us peace of mind, convenience, and new forms of entertainment.
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Talkback
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This is an interesting assertion, the claim that "people want" wireless everything. Not really, I don't think. They will buy it if it is offered, possibly, but the ones who are really pushing for it are the marketing people, who want something new to market.
Of course, there is a potential for a serious problem or two from the unlimited proliferation of wireless devices, which is that there would be no "clean" spectrum left for some really worthwhile application, and also that, since these devices are unlicensed and have no protection, that some other type of system could start using the same part of the spectrum, with greater power, and render all of the wireless gimmicks unusable. That would result in a lot more waste being added to the waste stream. Besides those reasons, the fact remains that a wired connection uses less power than a wireless connection, and is more secure, as well.
William Ketel - 2012-12-1 06:56:35 PST -
Do not want ultra-low-power wireless. Will not pay for same. Want 802.16 and 802.16m.
Pat McClung - 2011-22-12 11:02:40 PST
