Wireless markets may have slowed over the last several years, but wireless technology continues to advance. Many of the exhibitors at the recent Wireless Systems Design Conference & Expo pointed to aggressive product development programs as their way to break out of a sluggish economy for high-frequency electronics sales. Held March 8-10, 2004 at the San Diego Convention Center (San Diego, CA), the technical conference and exhibition featured technical presentations by some of the leading personalities in wireless technology as well as several new product launches representing significant advances in the current production state of the art.

Held for the first time in Southern California, the three-day event offered several Keynote addresses with different themes. On opening day, Dr. Henry Samueli, co-founder and chairman of Broadcom Corp. offered his views on of the state of present and future wireless markets in a talk entitled "Wireless in Everything: Life in a Fully Connected World."

The following day, Dr. Ronald E. Reedy, founder, vice president, and CTO of Peregrine Semiconductor, switched to a more military theme in his presentation "Managing Mil/Space and Commercial Business in RFICs." In his presentation, he used a two-channel Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver design as an example of a military development program that provided solid business for the company, and was later refined for several commercial products.

In a third Keynote Address, Robert Poor, CTO and co-founder of Ember Corp., projected many of the industrial uses for wireless technology in a talk entitled "The Future of Industrial Wireless: What's on the Horizon and Where the Growth Will Be." His address was part of the first-ever Industrial Wireless Applications Summit (IWAS) technical program within the Wireless Systems Design Conference & Expo. The IWAS featured a strong lineup of technical presentations on industrial applications, and included a tutorial on RF/wireless basics by Mihir Ravel of National Instruments, the migration of wireless technology to the industrial sector by Enrico De Carolis of Numatics, Inc., applications for radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and readers in industrial applications by Sean Loving of SkyeTek, and the use of RFID technology in fluid tracking and monitoring by Rick Garber of Colder Products.

Technical sessions at the Wireless Systems Design Conference & Expo were offered in numerous tracks, including Broadband/Wireless Networks, Handset Design, Power Management, Wireless Security, and Test and Measurement. One of the better-attended sessions explored variations on conventional wireless modulation techniques, such as ultrawideband (UWB) and ultranarrowband (UNB) modulation. In a talk entitled "Understanding and Using Ultra Wideband (UWB)," Jon Adams, director of radio technology for the Radio Products Division of Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector compared UWB to Bluetooth and other established wireless-communications formats and explores its possible benefits over existing wireless-communications technologies. Roberto Aiello of Staccato Communications reviewed the activities of the Wireless 1394 group in their push toward UWB standardization, while Kursat Kimyacioglu of Philips Semiconductors explored his company's interest in UWB technology for consumer applications.

On the UNB side, Harold Walker of Pegasus Data Systems addressed an early-morning crowd with his review of the sometimes-controversial UNB approach to transmitting information. He was backed by Bohdan Stryzak of Photron Sciences who offered a comparison of UNB and UWB technologies, and detailed how each was suited for a different set of applications.

On the exhibit floor, news on the product-development front came in many shapes and sizes. Atmel Corp. (San Jose, CA), for example, announced a line of power amplifiers based on silicon germanium (SiGe). Models TO905 and ATR0906 are fabricated with a proprietary SiGe process and designed for frequencies of 135 to 600 MHz and 500 to 1000 MHz, respectively. As much as 32 dB power gain can be set dynamically, with as much as +35 dBm output power in CW mode and efficiency as high as 55 percent.

In addition, Atmel announced that its GPS chip set is now equipped with new read-only-memory (ROM) version 3.0 which provides improved navigation accuracy and integrity as well as higher sensitivity. The new ROM allows the chip set to receive Satellite Based Augmentation System (SBAS) signals from multiple geostationary satellites such as the Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) satellite in the US and the European Geostationary Navigational Overlay System (EGNOS) in Europe simultaneously. The company's GPS receiver, which employs a 16-channel architecture (compared to the 12-channel approach by many GPS receivers), uses this additional information to improve the navigation accuracy. The chip set's GPS receiver can track signals as low as −150 dBm.