How We See CE

In the year since my original post to this blog, "Setting the standard in wireline home networking", our industry has devoted many engineer-hours to progressing the wireline home networking standards currently in development. Now that we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, it is time to turn our attention from setting the standard to delivering it.

First: an administrative point. In this post, I represent my own thoughts and opinions. I am not representing the views of the industry groups and standards groups mentioned. Next: a recap. The wireline home networking industry wisely concluded a few years back that a SDO (standards development organisation)-endorsed standard was a necessary prerequisite to the mass market, and that proprietary solutions were condemned. A project was establi...Read More

The 60GHz spectrum is the new hot topic in the wireless industry, but its origins and functions are still relatively unknown. This post aims to delve a little deeper into its technical history and to explain how it works and why there is so much support for this band for wireless connectivity. The 60 GHz band is an excellent choice for wireless applications requiring gigabit-plus data rates especially considering the large bandwidth and high allowable transmit power. The cost and ease of bringing these capabilities to market is minimized since the spectrum is license-exempt and there are no regulatory issues that would prevent worldwide approvals. Much like the Internet industry jump from analog to broadband, the leaps in data rates from Wi-Fi to 60GHz-based wireless will open up a new set of consumer applications never before thought possible. First, however, we must examine how ...Read More

As wireless connectivity becomes an increasing preference across many consumer electronics product categories, the conversation about the potential for 60GHz technology to transform the wireless A/V industry for home entertainment, personal computing and consumer electronics is picking up momentum. Consumers, industry enthusiasts and retailers are beginning to pay greater attention to 60GHz and understand its capabilities and importance.

Due to its unique characteristics, 60GHz is the ideal candidate to follow the bandwidth-challenged 2.4 and 5GHz (Wi-Fi/802.11) wireless technologies. The characteristics outlined in the following paragraphs offer operational advantages not available in the current Wi-Fi radio frequencies.

Where did 60GHz come from? Why is it different?

In 2001, the FCC (Federal Communication Commission) set aside a continuous block ...Read More

The recent GAO (General Accountability Office) Report on GPS (the Global Positioning System) brings up a number of relevant issues in sustaining and upgrading this widely used system to keep up with the challenges of meeting the expectations of both military and civilian users. However, this report has also raised panic flags in the minds of many people. I believe that in the fast moving world of the global Internet community, some of the projected worst-case scenarios and “gloom and doom” headlines can do significant, unwarranted damage to the perception of GPS reliability.

We started SiRF Technology in 1995 with a vision to bring the benefits of GPS to mass markets, and as a leading supplier of GPS technology to mainstream consumer devices today, our success is extremely dependent on GPS. We are a strong advocate of a robust ...Read More

For wired connectivity, HDMI has emerged as the enabling digital interface for HD in consumer electronics. The key to its success is the ability to deliver uncompressed HD 1080p video and audio at a rate of over 3 Gbps.

Wireless high-definition video transfer is a more challenging problem. Obviously, the key requirement is to establish a communication channel with enough bandwidth and SNR (signal-to-noise ratio), i.e., enough capacity, to handle the high video rate. What adds to this challenge is that any wireless channel will at times be variable and unpredictable. Its characteristics can change rapidly; due to fading and interference, its SNR and capacity can vary considerably. In data transfer, buffers and re-transmissions often are used to compensate for these problems. This is impossible in video connectivity, where the transfer must be done in real-time wi...Read More

Despite the promises of existing wireless HDTV standards, no standard has yet to successfully enable the wireless HDTV ecosystem. This situation raises a number of questions, including:

• What is the true value proposition for wireless solutions in the CE space, and
• When will wireless HDTV become of real value to consumers?

The answer is that wireless solutions have enormous potential in the CE space, but in order to be successful, such solutions must reliably enable whole home connectivity and support uncompressed HD video content.

As we have all seen, video content (often HD) is coming to consumers through an increasing number of channels, including cable and satellite, broadcast, physical media, Internet, and mobile networks and devices. However, consumers today...Read More

Readers of this blog are probably familiar with previous posts (here and here) that discussed some of the problems of the wired home networking industry, especially from the point of view of technical standards (or lack thereof). For many years, 3 incompatible technologies have competed for the powerline networking market, causing significant customer confusion and severely limiting the growth potential for the whole industry.

December 2008 brought excellent news on the standards front: after a lot of effort (and two weeks of late night meetings), ITU (an international standards organization which in the past has been responsible for all DSL/ADSL/VDSL standards) adopted the new G.hn standard...Read More

I often get asked why the wireline home networking market has failed (at least so far) to take off in the same way that the wireless home networking so obviously has done. I believe that there are three fundamental reasons for this.

First and most importantly, the applications driving home networking technologies have until recently been data-driven; shared printers, web surfing and so on. Such applications place relatively low demands on network quality of service. If a data packet fails to reach its destination, it is simply retransmitted and any associated delay does not have a measurable impact on the user experience. Now, however, as we move into an era of entertainment networks supporting multimedia services such as HD-IPTV and collaborative gaming, the demands on the network quality are significantly higher. A...Read More

Last week I wrote a story in a rather pessimistic tone about some recent developments in the home networking industry. Today, I'll try to provide a more optimistic view.

One of the reasons why the market for wired home networking products has not developed faster is the fragmentation of the industry. Today, consumers who want to create a wired network in their homes have to choose between five incompatible options; using coaxial cable (MoCA), using phone lines (HomePNA) or using power lines (with 3 non-interoperable options: UPA, HomePlug and HD-PLC). You can even combine then to create more incompatible options (using HomePNA technology or powerline technology over coaxial cable, for example, is also a popular option for some applications).

There is nothing wrong with those technologies,...Read More

When I first talked in this blog about my views on the future of the networked Consumer Electronics (CE) industry, I tried to share my optimism about how networked CE products were rapidly becoming "must have" products even for mainstream users. The demand for IP-enabled devices like gaming consoles, networked DVRs, network attached storage, VoIP adapters and digital media adapters is rapidly increasing, and according to Mark Kirstein from Multimedia Intelligence, by the time my Tivo-addicted son becomes 8-year old, the market for network interface semiconductors (including ethernet, wireless, powerline and coaxial networks) will grow to nearly $2.5 billion.

Given that most of the necessary technologies are already available, this growth trend only requires two key elements to continue: ...Read More

Information storage is a principal, "main street" factor in information processing systems, from large IT applications to smaller consumer-based uses. HDDs (hard disk drives) have been the dominant storage technology for over 50 years. Will HDDs continue to dominate storage applications? Or will flash memory and SST (solid-state technology) take over storage? What does the future hold for HDDs and SST? Is the future, as we’ve been saying at IDEMA, cooperative? Or does the storage industry face a "Battle Royal"? IDEMA has brought some of the greatest minds in the information storage industry together at DISKCON USA 2007 to help answer these questions, and more.

Consumer Electronics: One of the largest growth areas for information and content storage is consumer electronics. These devices, enabled by the constantly decreasing co...Read More

[Moderator note: "Mass Storage: Flash, Magnetic, or Both?", which Joel Weiss discusses in the following writeup, will be the subject of my September 27, 2007 feature article in EDN. Joel and I both welcome your comments on his perspective of this controversial topic.]

Every day seems to bring a new prediction that hard drives will soon go the way of the floppy disk, due to the emergence of solid state drives. I understand the appeal of a good story as much as anyone. But what is the real story with hard drives versus solid state drives? Quite frankly, when you look beyond the hype, it’s clear that hard drives are (and will continue to be) the dominant storage choice.

At IDEMA, we see hard drives and solid st...Read More

When it comes to hard drives and solid state (flash) memory, can you see the future? I think the future is cooperative and collaborative; in other words, we’re going to move beyond the past competition between HDD and SSD to a more cooperative and collaborative environment. The reason for this is simple—people have a range of storage needs, and different storage needs create different requirements. The digital lifestyle has created a greater demand for storage devices in general as we desire to move information or content from our offices to our homes, to our cars, and to our handheld devices.

Some of these devices require storage that exhibits extremely fast input /output times (i.e. nanoseconds) to store and retrieve information but needs only relatively small capacities, and price and volatility are also less of an issue. Examples include DRAM fo...Read More

Consumer electronics and the technologies that enable their evolution are interesting things. For example, how many people 20 years ago would have thought I would be typing this post at 36,000 feet somewhere above the 50^th parallel? Did anyone care that they could not do something like this back then? Admittedly 20 years ago, I could have cared less about being able to use a PC on an airplane and having the world as a virtual office. What I did care about was why I couldn’t play my favorite two-player Nintendo games with friends a few miles away as easily as when they were a few feet away. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, the problem was that we were not "connected". Before getting too far down that path, though, allow me to digress into a brief introduction about myself.

A few years after enhancing my hand-eye coordination on my ol...Read More

Let’s have a few thoughts about content consumption. This is probably the most critical and important part of the overall media ecosystem.

Having the best content creation and delivery is not enough; the consumption end of the chain must also be most carefully addressed. What works in the lab must also work 24/7/52 in the home. Consumers, used to watching no-failure TV so far, have a very low tolerance level when it comes to service disruptions or outages. Quality-of-service and availability are key factors – even when the content has already arrived in the home. That also goes, of course, for the CE devices installed in the homes.

A lot of care has been taken to make sure that devices interoperate (as we have seen in the MPEG-2 world) and indeed this trend continues with the video codec powering next generation video delivery, i.e. MPEG-4 AVC/...Read More