How We See CE
Industry leaders, moderated by EDN Senior Technical Editor Brian Dipert, share their thoughts on consumer electronics: past-event post-mortems, current developments and future trends. Follow the How We See CE Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/HowWeSeeCE.
Delivering The Standard In Wireline Home Networking
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 p ...... Read More
Comments (18)The Origins of 60GHz: How Does It Work?
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 especi ...... Read More
Comments (8)Move Over Wi-Fi, Here Comes 60Ghz: The Background And Benefits Of 60GHz Radio Technology
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 un ...... Read More
Comments (2)Sustaining And Upgrading The GPS System: Challenges? Yes. Panic? No.
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 ...... Read More
Comments (0)For An HD Video World: An Intelligent Video-Modem Approach
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 (si ...... Read More
Comments (0)Realizing the Potential of Wireless in the CE World
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 spac ...... Read More
Comments (17)How To Save The Home Networking Industry
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 pot ...... Read More
Comments (10)Setting The Standard In Wireline Home Networking
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 ap ...... Read More
Comments (17)Towards A Converged Home Network
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 f ...... Read More
Comments (5)How To Kill The Home Networking Industry
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 incr ...... Read More
Comments (31)Storage Goes Main Street – Drive On!
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 ...... Read More
Comments (4)Going Beyond the Hype: The Real Story Of Hard Drives Versus Solid State Drives
[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 so ...... Read More
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