Too much convergence
Rick Nelson, Chief Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 2/1/2006
"Convergence" was a key theme at the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society's MTT Wireless Week 2006, held in San Diego January 16–20. Fawzi Behmann, director of strategic marketing at Freescale Semiconductor, addressing a January 16 press conference, discussed "convergence challenges" for next-generation wireless networking. Consumers, he suggested, will be demanding a convergence of ease of use, reliability, and security within devices that provide a convergence of voice, data, and audio and video functionality.
Product introductions at the show also dealt with convergence. The convergence of RF and mixed-signal circuitry within single products is one factor that prompted Keithley Instruments to launch a new line-up of RF instruments: a signal generator, a signal analyzer, and an RF power meter. Walter Strickler, Keithley director of marketing for wireless/RF business, cited ease of use as a key feature that will make the instruments attractive to engineers facing RF measurement challenges for the first time.
For its part, Agilent Technologies addressed the convergence of RF, IF, and data-conversion functionality within a single semiconductor device. Agilent application specialist Mark Lombardi explained that with such levels of integration, access to analog I/Q signals is disappearing, although the need to make I/Q measurements is not. Agilent's solution? Porting its 89600 Series VSA (vector signal analysis) software to its line-up of logic analyzers, which engineers can then use to monitor the flow of digital I/Q data across the buses connecting RF and base-band chips.
The Wireless Week show itself helped to demonstrate the limits of convergence. To constitute the week's events, the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium, the IEEE Topical Workshop on Power Amplifiers for Wireless Communications, the 6th Topical Meeting on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems, and 125 exhibitors all converged on San Diego. Event general chair Fred Schindler expressed his satisfaction at the registration of about 2000 registrants attending 306 peer-reviewed technical papers. But the technical programs, widely dispersed within the convention-center/hotel complex, seemed to leave little opportunity for attendees to get hands-on experience with the Keithley instruments, Agilent software, and other new products on display.
Let's hope that as the "warm weather show" travels to Long Beach, Orlando, and then back to San Diego over the next three years, the organizers will add sufficient breaks within the technical programs to encourage hands-on experience on the exhibit floor.
