Electronix Express Newsletter

September 2006 Issue

Welcome to the September 2006 Issue of the Electronix Express Newsletter

STORIES

Futurists Pick Top Tech Trends

Laptops in Tow, More Americans Work on Vacation

Google Offers Live Traffic Maps On Cell Phones

China Mobile Firms Poised for Global Domination

Antenna Design Decreases Bulk But Boosts Bandwidth

GaAsing Up Cellphones

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1. Futurists Pick Top Tech Trends

Simplicity: Over the past couple of decades, gadget makers have toiled ceaselessly to add functionality. As a result, your cell phone can now play games, do math and sound off like a barking dog when your ex calls. Your digital camera can shoot extremely poor-quality video. And nearly every device you own with a screen also contains a clock.

The problem, says Ian Pearson, futurist in residence at British Telecommunications, is that most people buy a device for a particular purpose. They neither want nor care about all the extra capabilities.

Mobile socialization: Already our cell phones and PDAs work well at both contributing to our social lives (i.e., getting in touch with friends) and spoiling them (i.e., meeting friends but ignoring them to answer cell-phone calls).

But according to futurists, we've only scratched the surface of figuring out how our portable communications devices can be of service.

What's in store? How about mapping programs that show us whether anyone we'd like to see is nearby. Or a mobile reference modeled on Wikipedia that can tell us if the restaurant on the corner is any good.

Going green: Many futurists predict that growth in the market for renewable energy sources will be particularly strong. The World Future Society, for one, forecasts that offshore wind farms will grow into a $3 billion-a-year industry by 2008.

Andy Hines, a lecturer in futures studies at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, also envisions growing demand for information-sensing devices that can reduce energy consumption.

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2. Laptops in Tow, More Americans Work on Vacation

The number of Americans who work during their vacations has nearly doubled in the last decade. Why? Easy access to laptop computers has made it the most useful tool for working on holidays. Some 43 percent of office workers said they work on vacation, compared with 23 percent in a survey taken in 1995. Overall, roughly one in four employees said they spent three or more hours working during vacation. Most said they were committed to the job or had a pressing assignment, while 10 percent cited an inability to relax until things were taken care of. Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and author of "Crazy Busy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!," said the trend likely includes people who keep working for good reasons as well as bad.

In the latest survey, 41 percent of workers said their laptop computer made it easiest to work on holiday, followed by their cellular phone, personal computer and BlackBerry.

In 1995, most people cited their cell phone first, along with their beeper, fax machine, laptop and personal computer.

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3. Google Offers Live Traffic Maps On Cell Phones

Google Inc.has begun offering mobile phone users in more than 30 major U.S. cities the capacity to view highway maps with live traffic data.

The Mountain View, California-based company said that Google Maps for Mobile would allow mobile phone users to chose a destination within Google Maps and select show traffic. Google Maps in turn calculates the route to the location. Highway traffic information is sent to the phone, with road conditions highlighted in three colors: red for congested, yellow or orange for slowdowns, and green for smooth sailing.

The service can be found on mobile phone Web browsers at http://google.com/gmm. Google said it is offering comprehensive data on traffic conditions in more than 30 major U.S. metropolitan areas and partial information in an unspecified number of other areas. Traffic data is available only in the U.S. market.

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4. China Mobile Firms Poised for Global Domination

China's largest mobile phone makers are set to grow into global giants, according to industry sources. Leading the pack is Huawei, which now has some 35,000 employees and revenue growth of more than 50 percent a year.

Huawei has been selling equipment and handsets outside China for 10 years, but passed a significant milestone last year when international sales revenue surpassed domestic sales for the first time. Huawei has offices in 13 countries in the region, and is actively selling products in at least 20 countries. The firm has products deployed in over 100 countries worldwide. The company recorded international sales of US$4.8 billion last year, 57 percent of the total. The Chinese phone maker left competitors no doubt about its arrival last year, winning orders from Europe's top carriers including BT, Vodafone (NYSE: VOD), Telefonica and KPN. Huawei has contracts with 28 of the top 50 network operators worldwide. Huawei's local rival, ZTE, has about half the sales, $2.6 billion in 2005, but is also beginning to move aggressively outside China.

China's mobile makers are benefiting from surging global demand for handsets and back-end telecom equipment. The world's largest domestic market gives them a firm footing for expansion.

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5. Antenna Design Decreases Bulk But Boosts Bandwidth

Researchers at the Georgia Tech Research Institute have developed a phased-array antenna that can subsume the jobs of five conventional antennas. The design, a fragmented-aperture antenna, has demonstrated bandwidth of 33-to-1, and the researchers believe they can extend that to 100-to-1 to handle radar and communications applications.

The antenna's developers fabricated it using nothing fancier than pc-board technology. Its performance characteristics, the culmination of more than a decade of research using sophisticated modeling tools, is owed to a unique pattern of metal-foil-antenna elements. The pattern exploits a mutual coupling, a type of electronic interaction that antenna designers normally abhor, to deliver wide bandwidth in a pizza-box-sized package.

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6. GaAsing Up Cellphones

Gallium arsenide transistors could power tiny, blazingly fast multimedia handsets. So say a group of researchers from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. led by Matthias Passlack. They had fabricated metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), the types that drive just about every silicon integrated circuit, using gallium arsenide (GaAs) and a novel gate dielectric.

If Freescale and other research groups can overcome some significant manufacturing challenges, this innovation could lead to a cellphone-on-a-chip and instant analog-to-digital conversion. It may even enable chip makers to improve processor speed and performance when transistors on silicon chips can be miniaturized no further.

Gallium arsenide and other III-V semi-conductors are a better choice of materials than silicon for lots of things, including light-emitting diodes and lasers. These compounds, which combine elements from the third and fifth columns of the periodic table, conduct electrons up to 20 times as fast as silicon does.

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