As they are wont to do, the top two trade magazines have published their predictions for wireless technology in 2017. Here’s are some of the most important points:
electronic design: >Major Wireless Developments Driving 2017 Agendas – IoT and 5G top the list of dominant communications trends this year.
electronic design identifies the Internet of Things (IoT) and 5G cellular technology as the two dominant technologies for the coming year. They note that while consumers may not be buying into the concept of IoT, industrial IoT should “see some real action and growth because applications are more easily recognized and benefits more clearly identified.” They point to the incoming administration’s push for more domestic manufacturing as one reason that industrial IoT should begin to take off.
One issue that ham radio operators might be able to take advantage of is the lack of qualified people with IoT experience. “No one has multiple years of IoT experience, yet,” they note, and “IoT [development] is slowed as companies seek people with the right background.”
Automotive applications for wireless technology are also expected to increase in 2017 and beyond. Self-driving cars might be years away, but there is a lot of development work going on in this area. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications is only one of the wireless technologies that are going to make autonomous vehicles practical.
microwaves&rf: 5 Technology Areas to Watch in 2017.
microwaves&rf takes a little different tack than electronic design. They zero in on five technology trends, rather than particular applications. The five technologies they say to watch are:
- Semiconductor technology. Look for more GaN semiconductor devices.
- Filter requirements. 4G and 5G cellular devices need a lot of filters.
- Antenna solutions.
- Design tools. m&rf sees increased dependence on SDR technology for wireless applications, but notes that companies, “often lack the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) or system-on-a-chip (SoC) programming expertise to implement their designs on that hardware.” As a result, they will “increasingly turn to a model-based design workflow that uses generation of portable HDL and C code from models.”
- Changing test needs. All this new technology will, of course, need new test equipment to ensure that it will operate reliably and that it’s manufactured correctly.
When I got my engineering degree, microcomputers were all the rage. Even though I had an amateur radio license, I chose to work with computers instead of radio. Now, I wish I’d stuck with radio and wireless. If you’re at the point in your career where you’re making these decisions, keep all this in mind.
Dave New, N8SBE says
There IS a crying need for embedded system developers that not only know which end of a hot soldering iron to pick up, but also need to understand the requirements that hard real-time environments place on those systems. This is no longer your father’s 8-bit micro, where you could write timing loops in assembly language, and poll your way out of having to deal with interrupts and preemptive operating system threads.
It certainly is good to know about RF and all that entails, but an RF guy that can program all the wonder micro-chips that are coming on the scene (and do so properly, without causing race conditions and other ills of poor programming practice in an interrupt-driven, multi-tasking, multi-processor system), will be able to write his own ticket into a really interesting career.