The FCC’s recent decision to open the white spaces freed up by TV’s going all digital to unlicensed public access reflected considerable confidence that such devices could detect and not interfere with other users. The key to dynamic spectrum adaption is cognitive radio, which while proven in field tests is still a work in progress.

Cognitive radio will also play a key role in enabling interoperable radios produced by different vendors and using different modes of communication. That’s critical to police, firefighters and other first responders who show up at a disaster scene only to find that they can’t communicate with each other. APCO-25 is a step in the right direction but not a complete solution. Cognitive radio techniques and architectures, if standardized in next-generation communications equipment, could solve that problem. With today’s announcement, such standardization is now well under way.

The Wireless Innovation Forum (www.WirelessInnovation.org) today announced the approval of a specification, “Description of Cognitive Radio Ontology,” as well as new projects that support Software Communications Architecture (SCA), in conjunction with its 67^th Working Meeting in Schaumburg, Illinois, Sept. 13-17. New projects include an SCA Next project on Asynchronous Messaging, the creation of a Test and Certification Guide, and a project on Security Requirements and Profile Case Studies.

The Cognitive Radio Ontology is an important part of the Modeling Language for Mobility (MLM) project undertaken by the MLM Working Group of Wireless Innovation Forum (WINNF). The Ontology specification (WINNF-10-S-0007, available here: http://groups.winnforum.org/d/do/3370) includes:

• Core Ontology (covering basic terms of wireless communications from the PHY and MAC layers)
• Concepts needed to express the use cases; only the use cases that relate to the PHY and MAC layers are included
• Partial expression of the FM3TR waveform (structure and subcomponents, FSM)
• Partial expression of the Transceiver Facility APIs

It is expected that the Cognitive Radio Ontology and the MLM Language developed in this project will provide opportunities for development of interoperable radios by independent vendors and lead to additional specifications/standards for data exchange to support the next generation capabilities including vertical and horizontal mobility, spectrum awareness and dynamic spectrum adaption, waveform optimization, feature exchanges, and advanced applications.

A new project proposal on Asynchronous Messaging was approved by the Steering Group for the Coordinating Committee on International SCA Standards at this meeting, and work on this project began by the SCA Evolution Work Group. This specification is being developed for SCA platform and application developers who need higher performance for inter-component messaging, and will suggest CORBA-based solutions using asynchronous messaging that reduce message latency and allow parallel processing.

The SCA Test, Evaluation and Certification Model Realization was also approved by the Steering Group for the Coordinating Committee on International SCA Standards. This project will result in a recommendation aiming to define the realization aspects (including business models) of the role based, generic certification process of SCA based SDRs, as defined in “Test and Certification Guide for SDRs based on SCA, Part 1: SCA” (SDRF-08-P-0007-V1.0.0). It is being prepared for procurement authorities as well as producers of radios, radio components and tools, who are active in markets where the standardized SCA is relevant and compliance is required. It will give them guidance to establish test and certification capabilities for “category 1″ standards to ensure that compliance is met in an efficient way including time to market and cost.

The Forum’s Project Approval Committee has also approved a project defining Security Requirements and Profile Case Studies supporting the public safety community, giving guidance and a set of requirements that communications system designers, developers and manufacturers could follow in developing security solutions for their products. The resulting report will include a comprehensive set of security requirements that cover all aspects of SDR and software defined radio devices (SDRD) security for the underlying SDRD platform and its software operating environment and a requirements profile identifying a subset of the security requirements applicable to Public Safety SDRDs. Future activities will create additional profiles for other classes of SDRDs as time permits.

For more information on the Forum’s current projects, visit: http://www.wirelessinnovation.org/page/Current_Projects.

Work on these projects will be advanced through weekly committee teleconferences. The groups will then convene to discuss these and other projects and topics at SDR’10, the Forum’s annual Technical Conference and Product Exposition. SDR’10 represents the latest in an annual conference that has become a highlight on the wireless industry event calendar. The event brings together world class business and technical leaders from around the world across commercial and civil organizations including service providers, operators, manufacturers, developers, regulatory agencies, and academia. This year’s event will include more than 100 paper presentations, workshops on issues including tactical radio, space, military and public safety, in addition to the product exposition. Additional information on the SDR’10 program, workshops and tutorials can be found at http://conference.WirelessInnovation.org. To register, visit their registration page.

Are smart meters spies? They don’t have to be

Back in 2007, when the Dutch government announced that all 7 million homes in the Netherlands would be equipped with smart meters by 2013, it anticipated little resistance. After all, who wouldn’t welcome a device that could save both energy and money? But consumers worried that such intelligent monitoring devices, which transmit power-usage information to the utility as frequently as every 15 minutes, would make them vulnerable to thieves, annoying marketers, and police investigations. They spoke out so strongly against these ”espionage meters” that the government made them optional. Read

Cambridge Consultants has highlighted three applications ripe for innovation and market growth due to the newly freed whitespace spectrum: rural broadband provisioning; municipal wireless networks; and in-home media distribution. The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently released the final rules for whitespace radio devices, freeing up unlicensed bands to the public. Those highly desirable “super Wi-Fi” whitespace connections can travel through walls and transmit at a distance ten times today’s Wi-Fi signals. Experts suggest the rest of the world will not be far behind in legalizing unlicensed use of those unused TV channels freed up by the digital switchover, creating the potential for a $100B market. Read

CEVA in First Commercially Available LTE Handset

Last week, Samsung Mobile Launched the Samsung Craft, the world’s first commercially available 4G LTE handset.  Specifically designed for the MetroPCS network, and initially available in the Las Vegas, Nevada area, the Craft is a multimode handset, with LTE data and CDMA voice and texting capability.  The LTE modem is Samsung’s own, based on CEVA DSP core technology, while the CDMA modem is from Qualcomm.  It is a bit curious that Samsung chose not to employ the readily-available Qualcomm LTE modem.  Perhaps Samsung likes the licensing terms better with its own LTE solution…or maybe they believe it is a better performer (after all, Samsung is getting up to 80 Mbps with that modem in Sweden).

CEVA also Provides SoC Route for TI DSP Chip Users

Earlier this month, CEVA, Inc., the leading licensor of DSP cores, introduced a new VLSI+SIMD DSP that provides users of Texas Instruments C64X family of discrete DSP chips a capability of migrating to an SoC solution, while preserving much of their existing C64X C-code.  The new CEVA-X1643 is said to be highly energy-efficient, and capable of operating at 1GHz using standard 40nm CMOS process technology.  Although applicable for a broad range of applications, the full support for TI intrinsic functions and data cache the X1643 will be appealing to existing TI customers who want to incorporate additional features into a single-chip solution specific to their product differentiation.  CEVA claims a Tier-1 wireless vendor has already licensed the new product.  My guess is that it is for a wireless base station application.

The X1643 also features an AXI bus, making it easy to join up with a licensed ARM RISC processor.  But, TI is not rolling over and is also offering a number of new combo C64X-ARM processor chips…but they are still discrete solutions, available off the shelf to anyone.

As we have pointed out before, SoC solutions (and FPGAs) make up almost 90% of the $30 billion DSP silicon revenue TAM (in everything from MP3 players and disk drive controllers to cellphone modems), with discrete DSPs accounting for the other 10%.  Not only that, just a half dozen or so chip suppliers offer discrete DSP chips (with TI and Analog Devices leading the pack), while about 100 chip suppliers offer SoC products that incorporate DSP as a necessary technology (with Qualcomm leading that pack).

More Leaks on Verizon’s iPhone

We speculated in our last newsletter that Intel was able to acquire Infineon’s cellular chip business on the cheap because of the looming CDMA version of the iPhone for Verizon.  More indications of the CDMA iPhone have been leaking out of China, with Taiwan-based DigiTimes reporting that a China-based analyst firm has stated that Qualcomm is replacing Infineon in future iPhones and another article states that “Pegatron Technology is expected to begin volume production of a CDMA-version iPhone 4 in November with total shipments likely to reach 3-4 million units in the first three months, and 10 million by mid-2011, according to industry sources.”  Of course, we can’t verify the accuracy of the “industry sources.”

Advice to Intel

Now that the company is acquiring Infineon’s GSM/EDGE/WCDMA/HSPA (and LTE) cellular chip business, Intel needs to expand on that base to incorporate CDMA capability; otherwise Qualcomm will be the only company that can supply chips for high-end handsets that serve the largest American market. Actually, Intel was once in the CDMA cellular chip market…after it acquired DSP Communications Inc. (in October, 1999), but their biggest customer was Kyocera…and Qualcomm subsequently bought the Kyocera handset operation in San Diego (in December, 1999), effectively killing that market segment for Intel.  Note the dates.  Wow, talk about bad timing!

So, Intel can now either invest a few hundred million dollars and at least two years developing its own CDMA capability or it can acquire the only other vendor of such chips: Via Telecom.  Although not well known, Via Telecom is shipping CDMA 1x chips in volume, primarily to handsets in China and India (and Sprint in the U.S.).  Its customers include Nokia, Pantech, Samsung and white-box handsets in China.  The company claims to also have CDMA 1xEV-DO Rev. A chips, but we haven’t seen them shipping in handsets, yet. But, Intel’s financial and marketing muscle could ensure that happening.

We know that CDMA will ultimately give way to LTE, but for at least the rest of this decade CDMA will be required as a legacy fall back on LTE networks from CDMA operators like Verizon, Sprint, and MetroPCS, as mentioned above.

Via Telecom is the San Diego subsidiary of Taiwan-based Via Technologies, Inc., the number-three X86 processor supplier. I suspect that Intel could offer enough money to get Via Technologies’ attention, but Via might also be open to negotiating better licensing terms for its X86 processors, too.

Evolved EDGE: A Technology Who’s Time has Come

The industry buzz is all about LTE as the next big thing.  However, much of the world would be happy simply to get better results over the installed (and still growing) EDGE network.  EDGE represents improved data rates over that of earlier GPRS, with average bit rates in the neighborhood of 200kbps…which is almost 5 times faster than dial-up Internet access.  But, it can be better. The 3GPPS Release 7 specifies EDGE evolution, which some refer to as Evolved EDGE or simply eEDGE.  eEDGE promises dramatic improvement in data rates, which can typically be about 500kbps, with a peak rate of 1Mbps (with a dual-carrier implementation). Thus, eEDGE can reach low-end DSL data rates (and end-to-end round trip latency of about 70ms compared to 160ms for EDGE), with only a software upgrade in base stations.  However, cellphones do require minor hardware changes (adding about $4.00 to the chip BOM).  The first commercial eEDGE network is said to be operational in Istanbul, Turkey (Turkcell).  Trial networks are also underway by Ericsson in China and India, and Research In Motion (RIM) has developed its own eEDGE ancillary chips.

With its eEDGE handset product on the way, RIM probably leads in the number of air interfaces supported by a single cellphone company.  It has handsets for GPRS/EDGE/WCDMA/HSPA/CDMA-1XEV-DO/iDEN and, soon, eEDGE.

Freescale Re-discovers AltiVec

Back when Motorola Semiconductor was supplying Apple with PowerPC-based G4 and G5 processors, the company supplied a significant SIMD processing capability (similar to Intel’s SSE…streaming SIMD extensions) called AltiVec.  Meritorious in concept, the vector and DSP capability that AltiVec instruction set provided found its way into IBM’s Cell BE processor and Wind River (now owned by Intel) also embraced AltiVec.  But, as the company separated from Motorola and became Freescale, AltiVec continued shipping into high-performance military and bio security and print imaging applications, but was relegated to catalog status and Apple changed over to Intel Pentiums.  Meanwhile, Freescale beefed up its PowerPC heritage to create the QorIQ (pronounced “core IQ”) family of communication processors which dominate the cellular base station RISC market for layer-2 processing.  Although some members of the QorIQ family incorporate Freescale’s e500 DSP core, Freescale re-discovered the merits of adding AltiVec to that processor family.

Today, Freescale made an announcement that it was adding an enhanced reincarnation of AltiVec technology into the QorIQ family, but with new logic and a dozen new instructions that assist compiler optimization, etc.  The company expects AltiVec to improve layer-2 base station processing by 30-50%, while providing IPV6 support and improved security capabilities.  As this is an architectural announcement, we can expect products added to the company’s QorIQ 5500 family portfolio early next year.

AT&T Femtocells Will Ultimately be “Free”

AT&T has been criticized for charging $150 for their residential femtocells (MicroCells); devices which can enhance AT&T’s otherwise patchy cellular coverage. Compared to Japan’s SoftBank, which provides femtocells to its cellular subscribers for free, this seems a bit high.  Industry sources indicate to me that the reason for the relatively high price for a device that is equally beneficial to the customer and to AT&T is that the devices are currently supply-constrained by component shortages.  It appears that when the supply shortage is relieved, AT&T may be providing their femtocell devices for free (OK, subsidized)…since they can enhance network coverage and improve customer satisfaction, leading to reduced churn and higher overall revenues.

Component Shortages are Real

Several handset vendors have recently cited component shortages that are constraining their revenue growth, including Motorola in the U.S.  The average handset consists of hundreds of items, from tiny resistors and capacitors to chips and displays.  The shortage of a single 5-cent component can prevent a $200 handset from shipping (times hundreds of thousands of units).

History proved this when Ericsson was in the cellphone business (before Sony-Ericsson) in the early part of the last decade (c.2002). Ericsson could not get adequate quantities of tantalum capacitors because of high global demand and ethical restrictions on purchasing from sources that could not guarantee that the raw material for tantalum (coltan) was not from the Congo.  You’ve probably heard of “conflict diamonds” from the Congo, but “conflict coltan” has also been very profitable for warring rebel groups there.  The impact on Ericsson was such that its very survival was in question.  Some feel that this single event led to the merger of the handset operation with Sony.  Tantalum is not the constraint today, but hopefully the current component shortages will soon diminish.

By Lawrence Der, Wireless Product Marketing Manager, Silicon labs 

Remote controls come in many different sizes, shapes and wireless technologies and are widely used in the consumer market as accessories for a wide range of products, such as televisions, video games, stereo systems, lighting controls and home automation including garage door/gate openers, air conditioning units, fans and automobiles with remote keyless entry (RKE) key fobs. The most common remote controls use infrared (IR) technology because of the relatively low cost of IR components, but these IR-based controls suffer from many drawbacks including requiring line-of-sight pointing, limited operating angles, short transmission range, reflection problems and high current consumption associated with the IR LEDs, which leads to low battery life. RF remote controls resolve these issues and are appearing in greater numbers because consumers are demanding a much better user experience. In addition, technology improvements are closing the RF-IR price gap. 

Figure 1: Simplified Block Diagram of an RF Remote Control

All RF remote controls share common features as shown in the simplified block diagram in Figure 1. The basic components of an RF remote control are buttons for the user to input a command, a microcontroller unit (MCU) to process the user commands into digital messages, an RF transmitter (RF TX) to modulate and transmit the message, an antenna, and a battery to provide power to the remote control. The common challenges manufacturers face in designing RF remote controls are to provide consistent maximum transmission range, ensure long battery life and maintain low system costs. 

Maximizing transmission range involves transmitting as much power as possible (within governmental regulatory limits) while providing a receiver with excellent sensitivity since the total transmit distance is a function of both the transmitter output power and the sensitivity of the receiver. From the remote control side, the design goal is to set the RF output power to the government limit, which implies that all remote controls should have the same output performance, since they all transmit within the same limits. This would be true in an ideal world, but, in the real world with real components and manufacturing tolerances, it is practically impossible to transmit at this optimum power every time with every remote control manufactured on the production line. Moreover, interference from a user’s hand holding the remote control or even touching a button (known as the “hand effect”) changes the impedance of the antenna and thus changes the transmit output power. This real-world effect can reduce the effective radiated power (ERP) of a remote control and easily result in output power 6 dB below the government limit, with a corresponding 2x reduction in transmit distance per Friis’s free space path loss equation. Read more…

Battery Life Chart

By Aaron LaJoie, Electrical Engineer, Electrochem Solutions, Clarence, NY.

The ability to make real-time decisions based on pressure, temperature, or flow measurements while a process is running can provide significant advantages in a measurement and control system. These advantages can be expressed in different ways such as cost savings through improved resource management, or reduced reliability upon mobile workers. While measurement data can be used to dynamically control a process, it can also be displayed over a network to allow remote monitoring of the process status in real time. Rising pressures, temperatures, or vibration intensity can easily be adjusted if the appropriate personnel are aware of faulty conditions. As data is collected for process control or a SCADA system, it can also be archived for future reference when a review of process trends could provide additional improvements.

While wireles sensing clearly offers many advantages, the adoption phase moves at a slow pace in many industries due to inaccurate perceptions of the technology. One of the main reasons wireless technology is yet to be fully adopted is price. Many organizations have not taken the time to explore the benefits achieved via wireless sensing in comparison to the price of implementing the technology. Similarly, a company may be content with their existing wired system and be reluctant to make the switch.

Read more

Guest Blog by Will Strauss, President & Principal Analyst
Forward Concepts
  
Infineon Bidding War?
 
It is clear that Infineon has put its cellular handset chip business on the block and rumors are rife on who is bidding and who the likely purchaser will be.  In mid-May the Financial Times Deutschland published an article stating that Intel is interested in acquiring the cellular chip properties of Infineon Technologies AG, which provides the cellular modem and RF transceivers for all iPhones and the iPad. Apparently, Intel was initially rebuffed.  However, in mid-June, Infineon announced that it had engaged investment banker JP Morgan to study the possibly of selling their cellphone chip business.  I guess Infineon realized that they could make a nice profit through such a sale and they could concentrate on the more lucrative automotive market. 
 
By engaging an investment banker, Infineon is certainly interested in getting multiple bids for the cellular business and realizing the highest price possible.  Rumors abound that in addition to Intel, Samsung, Broadcom and even Apple are among those in talks with Infineon.  I think we can forget the Apple rumor, since even Nokia has decided it doesn’t want to be in the chip design business anymore (see Renesas, below).  The asking price has been reported as about Euro 1.5 billion ($1.9 billion), so let’s examine the possibilities:
 
–Broadcom: The company currently has a very small share of the 3G cellphone chip market, although it has done rather better in the 2.5G market (with Nokia as a major customer) and is a major supplier of ancillary cellphone chips, which include Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS.  In the past, Broadcom has paired its 3G baseband chips with Infineon’s worthy 3G RF transceivers, so the two companies are well-acquainted.  Infineon’s significant sales of both 3G transceivers and basebands to Apple (perhaps 40% of Infineon’s cellphone chip shipments) would be a major boost to Broadcom’s market penetration.  So the only question would be in Broadcom’s possible commitment to such a large investment.
 
–Samsung:  The #2 semiconductor company in the world would like to be #1, displacing Intel.  The cellphone market would enable it to quickly expand its revenues in a non-memory market that could eventually rival the PC market. The handset side of Samsung has been a customer for Infineon’s 3G RF transceivers, so that could be additional incentive to acquire Infineon’s cellphone chip business.  Samsung could certainly afford the rumored purchase price. However, would LG, Nokia, and even Apple want to buy cellphone chips from a rival cellphone vendor?
 
–Intel: the #1 semiconductor company has always coveted the communications market, and they realize that wireless could eventually rival the PC market.  Moreover, Intel has hopped in bed with Nokia on a number of wireless things, like licensing Nokia’s 3G modem technology and jointly developing MeeGo, the Linux-based operating system that Nokia plans to use in its future E-series handsets for the business market. It appears that the Nokia-Intel modem licensing did not include 3G/HSPA RF transceiver design, something that Infineon is good at (and few others are).  Unlike Samsung, Intel would not be seen as a threat by cellphone vendors, and everything points to Intel’s strong wireless ambitions, so we pick Intel as the likely buyer.
 
Fallout from Infineon Sale?
 
If Intel purchases the Infineon cellphone chip business what will happen to Comneon, the Infineon subsidiary that licenses 3G/HSPA/LTE software stacks?  Intel has never entertained the licensing model as part of its chip business and would likely shutter the Comneon operation, just as Motorola did after they purchased TTPCom’s 3G licensing business.  TTPCom’s 3G stack lives on (albeit with much improvement) as a component of Icera Semiconductor’s modems, MediaTek’s new WCDMA modems (via its Analog Devices cellular chip acquisition) and Marvell’s 3G modems employed in a number of RIM BlackBerry models (BTW, is the plural of BlackBerry® BlackBerries?).
 
There are a number of smallish LTE baseband startups (mostly morphed WiMAX baseband suppliers) that are aiming at the USB data dongle modem market.  And, of course, the data dongle market is currently the only LTE terminal market, and will be for perhaps another year or two.  For LTE cellphones, fallback to HSPA/3G/2G will be required, since the world will not instantly change over to LTE.  Faced with investing an estimated $300 million and many man-years to develop a complete 3G stack, it is likely the only possibility for the new LTE modem houses is to license the technology.  The possible sources will likely be narrowed to two: InterDigital Communications (which was a joint developer with Infineon of the Comneon stack) and NTT DoCoMo.  DoCoMo announced last week that it had licensed its LTE stack to MediaTek to augment its current 3G/2G stack.
 
Renesas Rising
 
At the Mobile World Congress last February, there were rumors that Renesas was soon to get a 3G/HSPA/LTE baseband modem design win at Nokia.  When I met with Renesas executives at the Congress, they readily admitted that they were beefing up their Munich operations to better serve Nokia.  But the emphasis was on Renesas’ RF transceiver and RF power amplifier chips and every time I asked about a baseband chip, they answered the question, but like politicians, never answering the question that was asked. So, I knew that something was underway, and it’s now clear that Renesas had licensed the Nokia HSPA+/LTE modem IP last year, and Nokia must have liked the progress made by Renesas.
 
In early July, Nokia and Renesas jointly announced that Renesas was to acquire Nokia’s wireless modem business for $200 million.  That acquisition involves transferring 1,100 Nokia R&D professionals who are mostly located in Finland, India, Denmark and the UK (a no-pain layoff?).  It appears that Nokia found it too expensive to continue developing its own modem designs and felt that it was more economical to acquire the modem chips from outside sources.  The deal is set to close later this year.  Apparently, Nokia will continue developing 3G/HSPA+/LTE software, which it will share with its modem licensees, which now also include Broadcom and Intel (who are not presently shipping cellphone modem chips based on the Nokia IP).  It’s clear that Nokia will continue purchasing modem chips from Qualcomm, ST-Ericsson, Infineon and Broadcom, so they can get competitive pricing (at least in non-CDMA modems).
 
You’ll recall that Renesas merged with NEC Electronics’ chip business a few months ago, and collectively, the two only had about a 2% market share in the 3G modem market, mostly based on NTT DoCoMo IP, and selling primarily to Japanese cellphone companies.  Now, the Nokia acquisition will enable them to expand out of Japan and be able to provide competitive modem chips on a global basis.  Although the “original” Renesas has competitive RF chips, it’s unclear whether the company will continue fielding its original application processors based on SH-DSP or will use the NEC-heritage EMMA chips based on ARM Cortex-A8 and A9 designs; likely the latter, since Renesas had also licensed the Cortex-A8 technology.

Forward Concepts
Tempe, AZ
www.fwdconcepts.com
Email: wis@fwdconcepts.com