What Role Will RFIC Designers Play in the IoT?

A panel of experts from academia and industry assembled at the recent IEEE IMS 2015 to answer critical questions are the role and impact of RFIC technologies.

Synopsis of compelling comments:
– “RF engineers will play a role in five out of the top six IoT design challenges.”
– “But not much RF innovation will be required.”
– “It is almost of tautology”
– “I’m a little less optimistic as to how big the role will be.”
– “You just have to be good enough in the RF design.”

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Chairs Speak on RF Role in Bio-Medical Applications

IEEE IMS 2015 Chair Vijay Nair and VC Stephen Goodnick share insights on skin-based RF wearables, energy harvesting, 5G, mmWave, material science and more.

The plan was bold, namely, to bring the bio-medical and RF-microwave communities together to talk about the challenges of radio-enabled wearable devices. Was the plan successful? To answer this question and others, “IoT Embedded Systems” sat down with the IEEE IMS 2015 General Chair, Dr. Vijay Nair, and Vice Chair, Stephen Goodnick. The discussion covered not only the RF-Microwave IC side of bio-medicine but also touched on trends in material science, energy scavenging, near-threshold voltage, 5G, millimeter wave technologies and more. What follows are excerpts from that conversation. – JB

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Radar Sensors Measure Heartbeat and Reconstruct Speech
Small, low power radars use Doppler and powerful analysis to monitor heartbeats, detect home entry and reconstruct audio signal from vocal cords.

It seems that the days of the tricorder will soon be at hand and a research team led by Dr. Schreurs of the University of Leuven will be ushering them in. At IMS2015 Dr. Schreurs spoke of small, low-power radars installed in the home, capable of performing a variety of medical sensing tasks. All of these tasks are enabled by radar Doppler shift measurements and powerful data analysis software.

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RF Energy Radiates to New Apps

Powerful chips finally enable competition of RF energy in microwave ovens, spark plugs, growth lights and more as demonstrated by NXP at the IMS 2015.

Emerging applications for RF energy will change the way we cook our food, grow high-yield crops, conserve gas in our cars and more. Many of these applications were demonstrated at the NXP booth during IEE International Microwave Symposium (IMS) 2015. To learn more about this emerging technology, IoT Embedded Systems talked with Paul Wilson, VP Global RF & Wireless Solutions and Roger Williams, engineer at NXP Semiconductors. What follows are portions of those conversations during the show.

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150th Birthday of Maxwell’s (Almost Lost) Equations

IEEE IMS 2015 celebrates Maxwell’s fundamental equations for electro-magnetic phenomenon that were almost lost to the world..

It’s their second 150th birthday really. Perhaps for something as monumental as James Clerk- Maxwell’s big four equations, in order to celebrate properly, one should celebrate for two years. Maxwell presented his groundbreaking work to the Royal Society in December of 1864. His work wasn’t published, however, until January of 1865. So, last year we celebrated the introduction of his equations and this year we’re celebrating their subsequent publication..

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Live Picture Coverage of IEEE MTTS IMS (RF-Wireless) 2015

My ongoing picture journal from the IEEE RF-Wireless show includes bio-electronics, IoT fads, RF cooking, thought-controlled cars and more.

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