Articles by Patrick Hindle

According to ABI research, Surging sales of netbooks, media tablets, and other “always connected” consumer and industrial electronics products mean equally robust performance in markets for wireless connectivity ICs. ABI Research expects that when the final numbers for 2010 are gathered, shipments of wireless connectivity chipsets will reach a total of approximately two billion units, a 22% shipment increase compared to 2009. "Market demand for wireless connectivity chipsets has been increasingly robust in recent years, a trend that will continue in the medium term," says industry analyst Celia Bo. “Total shipments of wireless connectivity chipsets are forecast to reach seven...

I am very happy the iPhone 4 is coming to Verizon soon as I have been with them for many years and would welcome the chance to get one. We have covered the antenna issues in a couple of previous posts and the Verizon iPhone brings some changes to the antenna design. Initially, Apple seemed to indicate that the changes to the antenna design were only to make it compatible with CMDA. Taking a close look at the exterior antenna, one can see that there are now 4 spaces between the antennas instead of 3 so there appears to be...

I have not seen that Femtocells have really caught on in the market as they seem to be only used for local range extenders. ABI Research says they are now attracting consumers’ attention in other ways. Their initial use-case has been to enhance indoor cellular coverage, but it is now clear that their potential utility is much wider. It is based on “ femtozone services” that use key attributes such as location and presence to trigger innovative applications residing on the mobile device, or in the access point, the core gateway, or the cloud. A simple example: a family alert...

Below is a list of the Top 10 most viewed technical articles for 2010. Many of these articles are from ealier in the year or 2009 as they had more time to be read than articles published toward the end of this time frame so don't miss our Nov cover story, The State of RF/microwave Switches , and Dec cover story, Smart Grid Communications Evolution , as they have been quite popular over the limited time they have been onilne. Here is the list: Fundamentally Changing Nonlinear Microwave Design (March 2010 Cover Story) RFID: The Next Generation Auto-ID Technology The...

Adaptive cruise control ( ACC ) has been an option on high-end luxury vehicles for more than a decade, but in the next few years ABI research says it will become available on mid-size and family vehicles. Costs have been falling slowly but steadily over the years, and now a new development promises to bring significant price reductions for the consumer. “The highest cost component of ACC has always been the radar sensor,” says ABI Research principal analyst David Alexander, “and now the cost advantages of silicon technology are going to take effect. We project that, by 2016, the lower...

Last year was my first year of predictions for the RF and microwave industry. So what are my predictions for 2011 and how did I do last year? 2011 Industry predictions: Tunable devices and circuits like RF MEMS and switched capacitor banks will be adopted in cell phones and alleviate some of the antenna reception issues that plagued phones like the iPhone 4. Smart Grid applications will take off this year with ISM and Zigbee wireless applications being widely implemented around the world. LTE will dominate the 4G networks as it is implemented around the world and zooms past...

According to a report from Strategy Analytics last weeek, the market value for GaAs revenues, driven by smartphones and consumer adoption of data-intensive applications, has grown strongly from the lows it struggled for in early 2009. The recently published Strategy Analytics GaAs and Compound Semiconductors (GaAs) report, “ GaAs Device Vendor Market Share 2009: North America ,” reports that this growth brought the total market value for GaAs revenues to little more than $4 billion, a slight increase over 2008 revenue levels. Skyworks Solutions nudged past RFMD to take the top revenue spot for North American vendors. However, less than...

ABI recently talked about the rapid Chinese TD-SCDMA rollouts and the often-maligned GSM/GPRS/EDGE equipment markets have benefited the base station RF power amplifier and RF power device markets. The stated that GSM/GPRS/EDGE RFPAs and devices are still shipping in the millions. The Asia-Pacific region is presently accounting for more than 50% of the RF power semiconductor devices sold into the mobile wireless infrastructure segment. Recent Chinese TD-SCDMA base station deployments have been massive, and have buoyed RF power vendors to a tremendous degree. That demand is expected to strengthen the market until at least sometime in 2011, and the Chinese...

A new ABI report says that capital expenditure on mobile backhaul varies greatly by region and by technology. While most countries face similar current or future struggles to reduce network congestion, the solutions being adopted differ according to existing infrastructure, network generations, and government mandates and incentives. One major division is whether to use optic fiber or microwave for mobile backhaul . CAPEX for microwave backhaul will peak in Western Europe this year at almost $4.4 billion, more than triple the figure for the next-highest region, Asia-Pacific. The European spending surge is due to the expansion of 3G networks to...

There has been a wide array of cell phone radiation protection devices such as antenna shields, cell phone holders/covers, gloves and hats but now there is Belly Armor . It claims to protect an unborn child from everyday radiation from sources ranging from cell phones to WiFi with a material that is provided to act as a Faraday cage. It comes in various forms such as a blanket, belly band and tee. I have not seen any evidence that non-ionizing radiation does any damage to the body other than heating from very high power sources. The FCC has set conservative...