So that raises the question that everyone has been asking: How is Beijing going to host the world’s premier athletic competition in a mere few months? The Chinese have instituted a decade long plan to clean up Beijing’s air, but opinions vary on how well it has worked so far (and my experience last week would suggest that it hasn’t). There are also more drastic contingencies planned, such as shutting down factories, restricting automobiles, and even seeding clouds to force rain, in an effort to “cleanse the air”. Some athlete’s aren’t so confident - one of the world’s premier marathon runners today announced that he may pull out of the Olympic due to health concerns related to the pollution.

So what’s the long term solution to the pollution in China and elsewhere around the world? Probably not restricting traffic or seeding clouds. The problem will be ultimately solved through consumer demand and engineering innovation, or green engineering . Consumer demand is what is causing the huge uptick in green products and corporate sustainability plans. Sure, there is a lot of hype out there (now called “Greenwashing“), but the net effect of all the focus on environmental sensitivity is a positive one. Even more sustainable are the discoveries and innovations in the scientific and engineering community. China’s pollution, for example, is primarily the result of coal power plants (a new plant opens in China every week to 10 days) and automobiles. Both of these industries are seeing huge investments in research to fund cleaner, more sustainable alternatives. The global investments in renewable energy reached $100B in 2006 and its projected to grow to more than $750B in the next 10 years. Research abounds in more efficient solar, wind, and even wave energy production. There is also a large investment in researching and productizing alternative fuel and zero emissions vehicles.  We don’t yet know which of these innovations will prove most successful, but innovation, combined with a capitalistic system which rewards it, will ultimately triumph.  Its only a matter of time before these inventions are not just a novelty, but a economically sustainable business delivering zero emissions but also better performance and lower cost of ownership than their fossil fuel predecessors. It might not be in time for the Beijing Olympics, but hopefully it will be in time to clean the air for the next generation of China’s urban population.

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So, the question is, what is driving this change? I think first and foremost, we’re starting to really see the impact of ubiquitous wireless connectivity. The iPhone happened to make the full Internet available in way that is as good or better than the experience on the PC. Once the Internet makes the jump to wireless devices, the dynamic of the Internet will really change. The PC will quickly become irrelevant as an Internet device - the number of mobile devices (>1 billion per year) dwarfs the number of PCs (about 250 million per year). As Bolaji Ojo of EEtimes recently stated in his article Wireless is everywhere, ignore it at your peril, “the search is over for the next killer app…it is wireless”.

As an extension of my own personal iPhone observations, I think the new wireless Internet will have some of the following attributes:

• Usage an order of magnitude greater than the current web;
• Significantly increased demand for real time information;
• A two way communication portal, not just an information source (Web 2.0);
• Optimized primarily for mobile devices, not PCs.

It will get even more interesting as the wireless data bandwidth explodes with standards such as WiMAX and LTE. 2008 should be a fascinating year for wireless, particularly, the wireless Internet.

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Emulation-Based ATE That Improves System-on-a-Chip and System-in-a-Package Testing
As semiconductor devices become more complex, the process of testing each part completely with a traditional vector-based methodology is increasingly difficult. Complex systems-on-a-chip (SoCs) and systems-in-a-package (SiPs) require a system-level functional test more closely related to testing components placed on a printed circuit board than a typical chip test, but they still require the high speeds demanded in production test for the semiconductor industry. The strategy of testing a device by emulating actual real-world signals provides a better method of functional test for these types of high-speed systems. This emulation-based ATE, or also termed “Protocol-Aware ATE” during last year’s International Test Conference, combines FPGA-based hardware to emulate the rest of the system in real-time with the pin electronics found in traditional ATE. This lowers the total cost of test through better use-case coverage and improves the user’s ability to debug failures. I explained this idea in more detail in a recent blog post. In 2008, I expect more vendors to incorporate elements of emulation-based tests into traditional tester architectures and for more users to incoproate platforms currently used in functional test, such as PXI, into chip validation and test applications.

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The Explosion of Wireless Standards
Test engineers are facing new challenges as the use of wireless technolgies is rapidly expanding. This was a hot topic during the recent CES 2008 conference. One article covering CES, stated “Today’s young people might be called the wired generation, but judging from this year’s Consumer Electronics Show they might not have to deal with actual wires for much longer.” Below are few examples of products that have traditionally been “wired”, but are now becoming “wireless” devices:

• • Apple Time Capsule, which is a 1 terabyte wireless hard-drive using 802.11n.
  • GM Vehicle-to-Vehicle technology, cars are becoming wireless network that can broadcast position, speed, heading to surrounding cars.
  • Samsung flat-panel wireless TV, that receives its data from an 802.11n transmitte

As Wireless transitions from a vertical industry into a horizontal application, more and more test engineers will be faced with the challenge of testing RF wireless capability. Soon, RF instrumentation could become as ubiquitous as general-purpose instruments such as digital multimeters. This growth in adoption requires test engineers to learn wireless protocols and keep pace with the rapid introduction of new standards. This trend was reflected in the 2007 Test & Measurement World Salary Survey (which I blogged about late last year), in which subscribers across engineering disciplines were asked to identify the top technologies they are being required to learn. Among the top responses were WLAN and WiMax.An additional challenge as wireless becomes ubiquitous on high volume consumer devices, is that manufacturers must optimize the throughput of test systems. When a low cost music player adds wireless capability, for example, the test system, which now must include RF test equipment, can’t add significant cost to the  product.  Keeping up with these demands requires an RF platform optimized for throughput and cost.

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