Bench Talk

Few other human-machine interfaces (HMIs) present as many challenges as the modern automobile, so have pity on the weary auto industry designer tasked with trying to come to grips with telematics. It’s only rival in complexity is the commercial airliner, whose flight deck remains chock full of knobs, dials, and switches even after wholesale changes that migrated functions to large touch screen displays like those in the Airbus 380 and Boeing 787 Dreamliner. At least pilots are highly trained, technically astute professionals, however, while drivers range from being technology haters to “enthusiasts” who like to tweak engine control modules for higher performance. Designing an interface that is usable by such a spectrum of drivers has got to be insanely difficult.

The practice of taking liberties with performance specifications to show a product in its best light is obviously nothing new in the electronics industry, and many others as well. If you’re old enough to remember, the output of stereo amplifiers and receivers was rated as “peak power”, which is typically five or six times higher than RMS power, but for the anointed it certainly makes the amplifier appear to be a real powerhouse. The output power of RF power transistors is even today sometimes specified at a single frequency where it’s highest, even though it falls off below and above it. And so on.

Like most people, I suspect, when quadcopters first appeared my first thoughts were about how totally cool they are followed by, “Gee, what could I do with one?” So it’s not surprising that terrorists have asked the same question and have come up with an obvious answer: Make flying Radio-Controlled Improvised Explosive Devices (RC-IEDs), which the U.S. Central Command believes they are already working on and have possibly developed.

Between the sessions, papers, workshops, and exhibit halls you got the sense that suddenly the super-hyped world of IoT, M2M, and V2V have finally intersected, and perhaps breathed new life into, the world of microwave, Millimeter wave (MMW), and 5G. At a time where the number of people in the world (6 billion) is exceeded by the number of cellphones…now what? IoT is what. M2M, V2V, IoT. Talk around Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) or what some refer to as 4.5G, is seen as an evolutionary step towards 5G driven largely by need to make those billions of connections possible.

If you believe what the wireless industry is saying about 5G, the fifth generation of cellular technology, you’d think it was the equivalent of landing a man on the moon. Not only will we have lightning-quick data rates and expanded coverage, 5G will make it possible to connect everyone with every “thing” that needs to be connected. That’s a tall order that could wind up being a tall tale, for several reasons.

The evolution of wireless (that is, cellular) capability has promised more than its predecessor. At a high level, 2G transitioned from analog to digital modulation and added modest data to voice capability, 3G added a faster but still iffy data rates, and 4G (LTE) represented a massive improvement in speed with data rates adequate for streaming video without hiccups.

The RF and microwave industry faces the same uncertainties and volatility as its more visible counterparts, but when the future has looked uncertain, a new market has serendipitously appeared to save the day. This time, although the industry overall is robust, a huge new market is beginning to emerge in the form of vehicle autonomy that will be much broader in scope than what IoT will bring. Driverless vehicle ubiquity is at least a decade or more away, but in the meantime RF and microwave hardware will be needed in steadily increasing amounts.

Contact is one of my favorite films, based on Carl Sagan’s book of that name, in which a great cast searches for and (thanks to scientist Jodie Foster) finds proof of alien life. There’s lots of cool RF stuff in that movie, and in many respects it pretty accurately depicts technology in action. You may have to forgive the formulaic “true believer bests the bureaucracy” element of the film. Of course, neither before nor since the film’s 1997 release has the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) found anything approaching “proof” of alien life.

About a year ago when I was helping my son set up his new life in Nashville, one of the things I chose to do was set up his cable/Internet/phone account. I found it curious that the cable company was offering its most sophisticated set-top box with integrated wireless access point and DVR for $1 less per month than its cheapest version.

When I first started writing about RF and microwave technology back in the 1980s, one of the first things I heard was that the industry suffered from a shortage of RF and microwave engineers and that the situation was becoming increasingly dire. As the story went, engineering students avoided the discipline because it was perceived as more difficult than others, that universities were not encouraging students to pursue it (and few even offered it), and that the “real money-making engineering opportunities” lay elsewhere. I still hear this story today from company presidents and engineering managers, so a quarter-century later I would assume that the situation would have risen from dire to catastrophic.