ICCE: Connectivity speeds up convergence, software defined products

As the International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) raises the curtain this week in Los Angeles, veteran attendees will marvel at the technical changes that have transformed their mission and expanded their knowledge. Long gone are the days of designing hardware only for HiFis, TVs and VCRs. ICCE's tutorial program alone will cover topics that range from wireless communication systems and the Advanced Television Systems Committee's DTV standard updates to interactive TV middleware standards, home networking technologies and digital rights management.

While the much-hyped "convergence" of consumer electronics, communications and information technologies is still shy of producing the single killer consumer product — among consumer design engineers — convergence is here, right now. And, with many R&D activities and product planning focused on converging technologies, systems designers are striving to gain knowledge that once fell outside their formal training and expertise.

As Stuart Lipoff, partner at Applied Value Corp., a Lexington, Mass-based consultancy, and past president of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Society, pointed out, "It is as important for the designer of a TV receiver to understand Internet protocols as it is to understand high-voltage deflection systems." Lipoff wrote earlier this year in an IEEE Consumer Electronics Society's newsletter, "To be a player in this [consumer electronics] industry, not only do you need to know everything about everything, you also need to translate the technology into products within an 18- month life cycle and then manufacture it at low cost in high volume to boot."

Lipoff singled out software-defined products (SDP) as a megatrend, changing the very nature of the consumer electronics industry today. In an interview with EETimes, he cautioned that the big issue with so-called software defined products is "knowing when you are done." Because software is so soft, it is tempting to keep playing with the design, features, and capabilities rather than ship the product and start to produce revenue. "You need to establish clear milestones and get the product out the door," he said.

According to Lipoff, the key technologies for SDP are mainly software and systems technologies. This includes underlying technologies such as an encryption, to protect and manage piracy of the design and feature sets, and a man/machine interface covering everything from touch screens and color displays to fuzzy logic, neural networks, expert systems and artificial intelligence. "Voice input/output and the ability to process natural language commands can also add much value," he said. Further, at the systems level, "Developing an overall architecture for the product that moves as much of the function as possible from hardware to software/firmware control, with the appropriate layers of software, is also important," he said.

But designers in the consumer electronics industry can no longer expect business as usual. SDPs allow a new way of doing business — creating more revenue and possibly high margin revenue by selling new aftermarket features, upgrades, and/or maintenance. "You need to think ahead, and think beyond just the engineering department," advised Lipoff. "All the departments, including marketing, and operations, need to plan and work together from the very start of the product design."

The ICCE technical papers presented in this week's In Focus provide us with some insight into the latest research projects and the design and engineering issues facing consumer electronics engineers. Rama Kalluri, a member of the research staff at Philips Research (Briarcliff Manor, New York) explains the details of fine granular scalability for H.26L-based video streaming while researchers at Auckland University of Technology (Auckland, New Zealand) and Motorola team up to discuss a new modulation scheme for wireless broadband Internet access.

The articles also reflect the sheer range of subject diversity: senior scientists at Philips Research Eindhoven (Netherlands) have come up with a new interconnection scheme for the remote mobile control of home appliances, researchers at the Consumer Electronics Research Group at the National University of Ireland (Galway) offer us their conclusions on R&D in the wireless consumer services infrastructure for wearable appliances and Martin Bolton, a senior systems architect at STMicroelectronics (Bristol, U.K.) explains the details behind a VLIW processor-based audio/video codec and how he came up with an innovative approach to motion estimation.

On the storage end, engineers at Sanyo Electric (Gifu, Japan) have designed a mobile storage device based on a 50 mm diameter magneto-optical disk and researchers at Pioneer Corp. (Saitama, Japan) discuss the specifics behind a car navigation system based on hard disk drive technology.

The versatility of this year's ICCE program also mirrors the consumer electronics industry's growing concern over the interconnection of various audio/video components within the home as well as copy protection issues and software downloadable design. Rick Doherty, president of the Envisioneering Group, said that notable changes in this year's ICCE program are more discussions and technology developments related to index and retrieval and transcoding. In designing a new generation of architectures, systems engineers are increasingly concerned with how users can more efficiently find their video or audio choices over networks. In addition to the demand for an archiving structure, transcoding is also becoming a critical technology, he added. Some video content — delivered in MPEG-2 — may now need to be transcoded to MPEG-4 or other more efficient coding formats, to fit more content into a home storage device, he explained.

Meanwhile, a new theme that will be explored by a host of technical papers: interoperability of home networks. "Everyone's got a home network and we have so many standards to choose from," said Michael Isnardi, a senior technical advisor at Sarnoff Corp. (Princeton, New Jersey), "but the pressing issue is, how can we make all these different home networks talk to each other?" In a session called "Interoperability of Heterogeneous Home Networks," different schemes and plans will be discussed including device discovery via residential gateways, a gateway framework for home appliance interoperability based on heterogeneous middleware in residential networks, and remote mobile control of home appliances.

This year's ICCE also unveils the proliferations of standards in optical discs, noted Isnardi. Many of the inventors of these formats are presenting their technical papers at this year's conference. Isnardi said that ICCE offers a number of venues small enough for attendees to share thoughts, compare notes and directly ask questions to developers of new technologies. "ICCE is a great sanity check for engineers to discuss what works and what doesn't," said Doherty. Destined to spark discussion: a Wednesday evening panel discussion on secure digital connections for home entertainment equipment. As many consumer electronics devices go digital and more content is electronically distributed, "Engineers today need to be particularly in sync with content owners and distributors," noted Doherty.