The Mobile Innovation Grand Prix was an event co-located with the Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona in Feb'2010. The Innovation 'Grand Prix' is a competition designed to showcase start-ups, small and medium sized organisations that are developing innovative mobile products and seek industry (operator/vendor/Venture Capital) support in order to achieve or sustain market deployment. It is a year long event, where winning solutions are chosen from several regions (Asia-Pac, EMEA, Americas etc) through a multi-level judging process. The selected finalists then get an opportunity to showcase their solutions in the MWC; where the eventual winner is announced.
The finalists in this year's event were the following:
Altobridge – Asia Pacific Tournament Winner
Electro Power Systems – EMEA Tournament Winner
fring – Israel Tournament Winner
IDENT Technology AG – EMEA Tournament Winner
Sentry Wireless – Asia Pacific Tournament Winner
Siklu Wireless – Israel Tournament Winner
Ubidyne – Americas Tournament Winner
WellDoc – Americas Tournament Winner
Panoramic Power - winner of the Qualcomm Ventures' QPrize
DevelopIQ** - winner of the RIM's BlackBerry Developer Challenge
The final winner was Ubidyne, for its Antenna Embedded Radio technology. I had followed the event closely and had made brief notes on some of the companies and their solutions. I encourage the reader to look-up the websites and presentations of each of the above companies. Theirinnovative solutions and proposals are eye-openers for many of us that struggle to find simple, effective and efficient solutions to everyday industrial problems.
The following is a writeup on some of them. Hopefully they would stimulate the reader to search more
1. The Winner: Ubidyne (Germany): Antenna Embedded Radio for Wireless Communication
The diagram above shows a conventional BTS (Base-Transceiver-Station) and one using Ubidyne's Antenna Embedded Radio Solution. The advantages are obvious:
1. No co-ax loss/noise/LNA. So receiver sensitivity is naturally higher.
2. More compact design due to miniaturization.
3. Reduced size and energy consumption.
**The above 3 lead to considerable capex savings.
4. Technology is used in NSNs Flexi-BTS which has the lowest CAPEX in industry. The Flexi-BTS won the GSMA –MWC “Best Network Technology Advance” award in 2009
Let us look more closely at their design:
Antenna Embedded Radio: Diagram 1
Antenna Embedded Radio: Diagram 2
The details of the design are self-explanatory. Note that since each “logical” antenna is made up of several miniature “physical” antennas, the nature of the antenna array is software configurable. This can be a major advantage while installing MIMO antenna configurations for LTE or WiMAX.
2. Siklu Wireless, Israel (http://siklu.com/technology.aspx)
They call their product EtherHaul™ - which is a "Gigabit Ethernet Wireless Solutions. Offering the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership. EtherHaul solutions feature carrier grade, high capacity Ethernet operating at the 71-76 / 81-86 GHz regulated E-band. Targeted for mobile backhaul".
Advantages of E-band backhaul:
1. No expensive fiber
2. Licensed (USA/Europe) with “low” licensing fee
3. Availability of large (10Ghz) bandwidth, 50x larger than the entire cellular spectrum (in USA)
4. Larger antenna gain at higher frequencies for the same antenna dimension. Transmit energy can be better focused at higher frequencies.
5. Higher transmit power. For eg FCC allows upto 3W transmit power.
Disadvantages:
1. Pathloss increases rapidly with frequency.
2. Atmospheric loss increases with frequency
Competitors : BridgeWave, E-Band Communications
Let us look more closely at the propagation loss characteristics of the E-band. It would give us an insight into the operation at the E band i.e frequencies between 71-76 Ghz and 81-86 Ghz.
Propagation Loss Due to Atmospheric and Molecular Absorption
Observe that a clear atmospheric window can be seen in the spectrum from around 70 GHz to 100 GHz. In this area, low atmospheric attenuation around 0.5 dB/km occurs, close to that of the popular microwave frequencies, favorable for radio transmission.
As as aside note that the small peak at 23 Ghz and the large peak at 60 Ghz occur due to signal absorption by water vapor and oxygen molecules respectively.
There is another atmospheric factor: absorption due to rain. This is known as rain-loss and can be significant at microwave and higher transmission frequencies.
Propagation Loss Due to Rainfall
Rain Attenuation: Above 10 GHz, rain attenuation places limits on link distances. “Heavy” rainfall at 25 mm/hr yields ~10 dB/km attenuation at E-band. This increases to 30 dB/km for 100 mm/hr “tropical” rain. These values of attenuation are used in link planning to determine the maximum Link length allowed to overcome rain events with a given degree of probability.
Note that Rain-attenuation is insignificant in the cellular band.
3. Panoramic Power, Israel (http://www.panpwr.com)
Energy consumption is one of the main causes for the Greenhouse Effect. Improving the world’s energy efficiency is the first item to address. Many energy studies have shown that if we measure our consumption to the right granularity, we will be able to become more efficient.
Enterprises, as well as homes have very limited visibility into the flow and usage of their consumed electrical power.
“We give complete online visibility into the power consumption of every circuit or device. We have developed a miniature, self powered, wireless sensor that is the key hardware element in our system. We can address any existing circuit or closet configuration, and can scale up to large facilities.”
"By enabling full transparency of electricity flow throughout an organization our technology platform opens a vast opportunity for energy management applications.”
Panoramic Power: Business Model
In response to energy costs, environmental concerns, and government directives, there is an increased need for sustainable and "green" business operations. Methods to measure power consumption and control energy output are now the focus of businesses worldwide, with customers looking for a method to reduce energy costs and implement increased efficient operation. Energy management is critical to this. As supplies and costs continue to rise, achieving a greener network and greener buildings is expected to become even more imperative.
Competitors
Cisco: Cisco EnergyWise converges disparate networks, services, and network-attached devices into a common view and set of policies for measuring and optimizing organizational power consumption. EnergyWise is designed to integrate future devices, network applications, and management tools to accommodate evolving organizational requirements. Working on protocols to regulate electric devices via the Internet
IBM: IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management is a software solution that monitors and helps manage energy usage of facility resources for efficient infrastructure operations. It will help optimize your energy consumption for higher efficiency of resources, lower operating cost, and reduced carbon emissions.
Incidentally Panoramic Power has now (Dec’2009) been bought over by Qualcomm
4. Ident Technology, Germany. Contact-less user interface
Products
GestIC: Due to the ability of the human body to conduct electricity, it can influence a minor electric field surrounding an appliance which is equipped with GestIC sensors. The approach of a hand is detected by four sensors which then transmit the coordinates to the electronics. Random functions can be designated to the coordinates.
This is a “core” technology which enables a variety of UI design.
Advantages:
1. Intelligent human-machine interaction: switches and buttons on the operating panel can be either just printed onto the panel or they are dummy switches which give the impression of pushing a button. No mechanical and less electrical parts.
2. Any material can be used for the UI since it would be only a dummy board with mapped functionality
3. Cost savings on Wiring/electronic parts. Multiple UI screens can be mapped into the same UI surface in a more cost effective manner
4. UI functionality can be updated via software only.
5. Functionality can be enabled via gesture and without actually touching. The following is an illustrative video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieolCZBvKPQ).
6. Same UI surface can be customized for different users in a natural manner
Technical solution/Usecase for automobiles
1. Transmitter electrodes integrated in seats of driver and passenger
2. Individual distinguishable signals applied to driver and passenger through electrodes embedded in the seat.
3. Signal is transmitted through body to particular switch or UI of interest and decoded.
4. The “touched” UI can distinguish between the driver and passenger based on the transmitted signal and accordingly customize its functionality.
This is a low cost solution to making the automobile UI sensitive to the passenger context.
This is all that I have for this post. Let us strive to be innovative!
The finalists in this year's event were the following:
Altobridge – Asia Pacific Tournament Winner
Electro Power Systems – EMEA Tournament Winner
fring – Israel Tournament Winner
IDENT Technology AG – EMEA Tournament Winner
Sentry Wireless – Asia Pacific Tournament Winner
Siklu Wireless – Israel Tournament Winner
Ubidyne – Americas Tournament Winner
WellDoc – Americas Tournament Winner
Panoramic Power - winner of the Qualcomm Ventures' QPrize
DevelopIQ** - winner of the RIM's BlackBerry Developer Challenge
The final winner was Ubidyne, for its Antenna Embedded Radio technology. I had followed the event closely and had made brief notes on some of the companies and their solutions. I encourage the reader to look-up the websites and presentations of each of the above companies. Theirinnovative solutions and proposals are eye-openers for many of us that struggle to find simple, effective and efficient solutions to everyday industrial problems.
The following is a writeup on some of them. Hopefully they would stimulate the reader to search more
1. The Winner: Ubidyne (Germany): Antenna Embedded Radio for Wireless Communication
The diagram above shows a conventional BTS (Base-Transceiver-Station) and one using Ubidyne's Antenna Embedded Radio Solution. The advantages are obvious:
1. No co-ax loss/noise/LNA. So receiver sensitivity is naturally higher.
2. More compact design due to miniaturization.
3. Reduced size and energy consumption.
**The above 3 lead to considerable capex savings.
4. Technology is used in NSNs Flexi-BTS which has the lowest CAPEX in industry. The Flexi-BTS won the GSMA –MWC “Best Network Technology Advance” award in 2009
Let us look more closely at their design:
Antenna Embedded Radio: Diagram 1
Antenna Embedded Radio: Diagram 2
The details of the design are self-explanatory. Note that since each “logical” antenna is made up of several miniature “physical” antennas, the nature of the antenna array is software configurable. This can be a major advantage while installing MIMO antenna configurations for LTE or WiMAX.
2. Siklu Wireless, Israel (http://siklu.com/technology.aspx)
They call their product EtherHaul™ - which is a "Gigabit Ethernet Wireless Solutions. Offering the industry’s lowest total cost of ownership. EtherHaul solutions feature carrier grade, high capacity Ethernet operating at the 71-76 / 81-86 GHz regulated E-band. Targeted for mobile backhaul".
Advantages of E-band backhaul:
1. No expensive fiber
2. Licensed (USA/Europe) with “low” licensing fee
3. Availability of large (10Ghz) bandwidth, 50x larger than the entire cellular spectrum (in USA)
4. Larger antenna gain at higher frequencies for the same antenna dimension. Transmit energy can be better focused at higher frequencies.
5. Higher transmit power. For eg FCC allows upto 3W transmit power.
Disadvantages:
1. Pathloss increases rapidly with frequency.
2. Atmospheric loss increases with frequency
Competitors : BridgeWave, E-Band Communications
Let us look more closely at the propagation loss characteristics of the E-band. It would give us an insight into the operation at the E band i.e frequencies between 71-76 Ghz and 81-86 Ghz.
Propagation Loss Due to Atmospheric and Molecular Absorption
Observe that a clear atmospheric window can be seen in the spectrum from around 70 GHz to 100 GHz. In this area, low atmospheric attenuation around 0.5 dB/km occurs, close to that of the popular microwave frequencies, favorable for radio transmission.
As as aside note that the small peak at 23 Ghz and the large peak at 60 Ghz occur due to signal absorption by water vapor and oxygen molecules respectively.
There is another atmospheric factor: absorption due to rain. This is known as rain-loss and can be significant at microwave and higher transmission frequencies.
Propagation Loss Due to Rainfall
Rain Attenuation: Above 10 GHz, rain attenuation places limits on link distances. “Heavy” rainfall at 25 mm/hr yields ~10 dB/km attenuation at E-band. This increases to 30 dB/km for 100 mm/hr “tropical” rain. These values of attenuation are used in link planning to determine the maximum Link length allowed to overcome rain events with a given degree of probability.
Note that Rain-attenuation is insignificant in the cellular band.
3. Panoramic Power, Israel (http://www.panpwr.com)
Energy consumption is one of the main causes for the Greenhouse Effect. Improving the world’s energy efficiency is the first item to address. Many energy studies have shown that if we measure our consumption to the right granularity, we will be able to become more efficient.
Enterprises, as well as homes have very limited visibility into the flow and usage of their consumed electrical power.
“We give complete online visibility into the power consumption of every circuit or device. We have developed a miniature, self powered, wireless sensor that is the key hardware element in our system. We can address any existing circuit or closet configuration, and can scale up to large facilities.”
"By enabling full transparency of electricity flow throughout an organization our technology platform opens a vast opportunity for energy management applications.”
Panoramic Power: Business Model
In response to energy costs, environmental concerns, and government directives, there is an increased need for sustainable and "green" business operations. Methods to measure power consumption and control energy output are now the focus of businesses worldwide, with customers looking for a method to reduce energy costs and implement increased efficient operation. Energy management is critical to this. As supplies and costs continue to rise, achieving a greener network and greener buildings is expected to become even more imperative.
Competitors
Cisco: Cisco EnergyWise converges disparate networks, services, and network-attached devices into a common view and set of policies for measuring and optimizing organizational power consumption. EnergyWise is designed to integrate future devices, network applications, and management tools to accommodate evolving organizational requirements. Working on protocols to regulate electric devices via the Internet
IBM: IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management is a software solution that monitors and helps manage energy usage of facility resources for efficient infrastructure operations. It will help optimize your energy consumption for higher efficiency of resources, lower operating cost, and reduced carbon emissions.
Incidentally Panoramic Power has now (Dec’2009) been bought over by Qualcomm
4. Ident Technology, Germany. Contact-less user interface
Products
GestIC: Due to the ability of the human body to conduct electricity, it can influence a minor electric field surrounding an appliance which is equipped with GestIC sensors. The approach of a hand is detected by four sensors which then transmit the coordinates to the electronics. Random functions can be designated to the coordinates.
This is a “core” technology which enables a variety of UI design.
Advantages:
1. Intelligent human-machine interaction: switches and buttons on the operating panel can be either just printed onto the panel or they are dummy switches which give the impression of pushing a button. No mechanical and less electrical parts.
2. Any material can be used for the UI since it would be only a dummy board with mapped functionality
3. Cost savings on Wiring/electronic parts. Multiple UI screens can be mapped into the same UI surface in a more cost effective manner
4. UI functionality can be updated via software only.
5. Functionality can be enabled via gesture and without actually touching. The following is an illustrative video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieolCZBvKPQ).
6. Same UI surface can be customized for different users in a natural manner
Technical solution/Usecase for automobiles
1. Transmitter electrodes integrated in seats of driver and passenger
2. Individual distinguishable signals applied to driver and passenger through electrodes embedded in the seat.
3. Signal is transmitted through body to particular switch or UI of interest and decoded.
4. The “touched” UI can distinguish between the driver and passenger based on the transmitted signal and accordingly customize its functionality.
This is a low cost solution to making the automobile UI sensitive to the passenger context.
This is all that I have for this post. Let us strive to be innovative!
Ø
No comments:
Post a Comment