The IEEE Seattle section has created a full day seminar on emerging wireless technologies from the Pacific Northwest. Wireless Industry Day, developed under the direction of Takao Inoue from National Instruments and Janet O’Neil of ETS-Lindgren will be a special event offering practical, application-oriented information from local technologists discussing trends in wireless technology across multiple industries including aerospace, wireless medical and communications. The event will be held on Wednesday, June 5, 2013, during IMS 2013.
As a meeting coordinator for AMTA with extensive experience organizing technical events, O’Neil has applied her talents and connections to create a program with top notch technical experts. While most of the speakers are from the region, O’Neil has tapped into her AMTA connections for the event’s opening and closing presentations. The first talk, “From Maxwell’s Equations to Modern Electromagnetics and Antenna Engineering Marvels” will be given by Professor Yahya Rahmat-Samii, a past vice president of AMTA and IEEE Fellow from the University of California, Los Angeles. Rahmat-Samii looks at how meta-materials, modern electromagnetic numerical and evolutionary optimization techniques in antenna system designs is supporting advances in the personal communications antennas that address human interactions and reconfigurable designs. This presentation also examines current medical applications including wearable, RFID, implantable and ingestible systems. Rahmat-Samii touches upon the wireless medical industry that will be further presented by Bill Saltzstein, president of connectBlue Inc., a Redmond, WA company that specializes in integrating Bluetooth based communication solutions in products for industrial or commercial use.
Saltzstein’s talk, “Bluetooth: The Future of Wireless Medical Technology,” will address the challenges of power consumption among portable medical devices, taking a look at how power needs for the wireless connections of these devices may constrain architecture and limit applications. This situation may change with the introduction of Bluetooth low energy technology specified in Bluetooth v4.0.
Dr. Julio Navarro, senior technical fellow with Boeing, will discuss how this company and many others are adapting to the ongoing technological advances that include a wide diversity of devices, device content, varying standards and methods of delivery. Navarro will discuss how various technology choices and the company’s decision making process drives its relationship with suppliers and ultimately impacts Boeing competitiveness and the bottom line.
Representing the perspective of a wireless chip manufacturer, Dr. Debabani Choudhury, IEEE Fellow, senior technologist and Harry Skinner, senior principal engineer, both of Intel Labs, Hills-boro, OR, will consider the proliferation of diverse wireless communication services in their talk, “Prospects and Challenges for GHz to THz Technologies/Architectures for Future Wireless Communications.” This talk will take a look at the worldwide research of various architectures including different variations of MIMO, MU-MIMO as well as mm-wave and THz research for ultra-high data rate applications.
Representing the communications industry from the operator’s perspective will be Scott Prather, lead product development engineer, AT&T of Redmond, WA discussing “Radiated Performance Assessment of Wireless Communications Devices - An Operator’s Perspective.” This presentation looks at how the assessment of radiated performance, which often requires special testing considerations and techniques, has become a major concern for network operators.
The final talk of the day, “Evaluating Over-The-Air Performance of MIMO Wireless Devices,” is by Dr. Michael Foegelle, director of technology development, ETS-Lindgren. Dr. Foegelle, an expert in the area of MIMO OTA testing, will discuss the pros and cons of different techniques that are vying to become the standardized approach for industry certification of MIMO devices. This presentation will demonstrate the differences in a number of these concepts and provide a range of measured results showing the variation between good and bad wireless devices.