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Wireless test opportunities
September 25, 2006
This week I’m attending a Frost & Sullivan executive congress titled ”Industry Outlooks and Growth Strategies 2006," where this afternoon I will facilitate an interactive roundtable discussion of wireless test and measurement.
Before hearing from other participants in that discussion, here’s what I see. Wireless test opportunities are abundant. It’s difficult to find a consumer computing device (fixed or mobile) that doesn’t include support for multiple communications standards: Bluetooth, GPS, cell (multiple flavors), WiFi (multiple flavors), video (for example, DVB-T and DVB-H), and so on. These devices impose their own test challenges and bring with them the associated infrastructure with its own unique test challenges: GPS satellites, base stations, network access points, and so forth.
In industrial automation, process monitoring, and inventory control, we increasingly find wireless implementations: RFID and Zigbee, for example.
Even in the relatively staid, cautious world (compared to the consumer world) of military, automotive, and aerospace, wireless technologies are evolving: satellite communications, navigation aids, collision-avoidance radar, adaptive cruise-control radar, avionics, and other applications, many of which operate in the microwave frequency ranges well beyond the 6-GHz or so limits of consumer wireless devices.
On the test solution side, we have capable dedicated test sets for each standard. They are very effective at what they do, although they are expensive and relatively inflexible. They are facing competition from lower cost implementations, such as synthetic instruments based on standard platforms, exemplified by last week’s announcement of 26.5-GHz PXI-based synthetic instrument. Such implementations can benefit from cost-effective standard hardware, but they bring about the challenges of defining who writes the software and who does the integration.
In general for wireless test, opportunities are abundant (the sky’s not the limit). But cost pressures are high and the competitive threat is growing. In addition, standards can be fluid (e.g., IEEE 802.11n), complicating the instrument-development process.
Read the post-event follow-up here.
Posted by Rick Nelson on September 25, 2006 | Comments (0)
