If the goal of the GSM Association comes to fruition, there will be 50 billion connected devices on the market by 2025, meaning that every individual could have approximately seven connected devices. That also means seven new revenue streams coming into the service providers who stake a claim in the movement, which is beginning to reach all industries from healthcare to transport to clean energy, education, consumer electronics and smart utilities. In an effort to drive volumes up and prices down, the GSMA launched a competition last week encouraging the production of standardized 3G modules in a range of consumer electronics devices. GSMA chief marketing officer Michael O’Hara spoke with Telephony about the GSMA’s Embedded Mobile initiative, launched last year, and the potential for service providers to move beyond voice and into devices everywhere.

On the networks’ evolution: When I came in [a year ago], we were focused on the mobile broadband space and the battle between HSPA, LTE and the WiMax camp. That was a valid technology debate a year ago; people were trying to look at what would win; what would be the best way to do mobile broadband going forward. We got to a point where that is pretty much over. We are now sitting around 315 HSPA networks across 127 countries. There are about 133 million HSPA subscribers out there now. It is certainly fast growing and will become the ubiquitous mobile broadband technology going forward. We still see WiMax as complementary in some emerging markets, but as a mainstream technology, we’re pretty much set on HSPA and the evolution into LTE. As that rolls out, we have 3G phones; we’ve seen the emergence of 3G laptops over the next year and operators starting to sell netbooks. The next step is embedding the mobile broadband technology in every device.

On the target verticals: There is definitely the potential to embed the technology in a number of areas. Obviously with consumer electronics where you start to look at connected cameras, MP3 players – all that fun stuff. The utility markets have always been big with smart metering, the ability to charge people differently depending on the time of day. It is interesting around performance information from cars and monitoring how cars are going along, health care, patient monitoring and well-being monitoring. Clean energy is a becoming a big thing around reporting emissions and air quality. Those are a number of verticals where you are starting to see this technology move and probably the target verticals for us.

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WASHINGTON: Pradeep Khosla, an Indian-American internationally recognised as an authority on robotics, has been selected to join a prestigious council, committed to US competitiveness in the global economy.

Khosla, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus has been selected to join the Council on Competitiveness — a select group of corporate CEOs, university presidents and labour leaders to evaluate economic challenges and guide American competitiveness in this globalised world.

“An internationally recognised authority on robotics, embedded systems, technology education, innovation and cybersecurity, Carnegie Mellon’s Pradeep K Khosla is an outstanding addition to our newly formed Technology Leadership Strategy Initiative,” said Deborah Wince-Smith, president of the Washington, DC-based council.

He was also recently appointed for a second five year term as dean of the prestigious Carnegie Institute of technology, in recognition of his leadership in research and education initiatives both within the university and internationally.

He will join an elite group of academic researchers and business leaders tapped to serve for the next three years on the Technology Leadership Strategy Initiative (TLSI), a collaborative effort designed to chart the most promising frontiers of technology and competitive advantage arenas for the United States.

The council estimates that technology jobs are growing five times faster than any other jobs worldwide, and 90 per cent of the fastest-growing jobs in America require post-secondary education. Khosla is founding director of Carnegie Mellon CyLab, one of the largest university-based cybersecurity research and education centers in the world.

The new initiative will be co-chaired by Ray Johnson, senior vice president and chief technology officer for Lockheed Martin Corp, and Mark Little, senior vice president and director of GE Global Research.

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Among the areas examined in this report are the technology, architecture and packaging trends affecting the industry, as well as a thorough discussion of new and emerging technologies and materials, potential threats and the latest regulatory developments and standards. Over 25 tables, graphs and illustrations are presented depicting a variety of power system schematics and comparisons, architectural standards, product introductions, packaging solutions, efficiency standards and other relevant information. The focus of this comprehensive analysis provides decision makers with an insightful look into the current and future opportunities and threats available in theembedded ac-dc power supply market.

Over the next few years, ac-dc power supplies will represent a faster growth opportunity than board-mounted dc-dc converter modules. This is a major development and marks a significant departure from past patterns. Historically, power converter makers have turned to dc-dc converter modules for high growth rates. That will no longer be possible. As a result of numerous factors, ac-dc power supplies now represent a better long-term growth opportunity than dc-dc converter modules (see Graphs 1-3). Despite a global economic slowdown, the outlook for the worldwide embedded ac-dc power supply market is expected to remain strong. Evolving powering architectures, packaging trends, and global standards for improvements in energy efficiency are combining with developments in advanced components and new markets for ac-dc power and to create new opportunities for makers of ac-dc power supplies.

The emergence of LED lighting as a major application area is another instance where single-output power supplies will have a strong positive impact on the market. More and more often, high-power LEDs are leaving their niche in small displays and are used in mainstream lighting applications requiring power levels of 100W or greater. At the same time, demand for lower-wattage LED power supplies will also remain strong. Given this increasing demand for LED lighting applications, a growing number of companies are introducing ac-dc power supplies designed exclusively for high-brightness LED lighting applications. In addition, there are a number of new and important packaging trends and applications moving into the market. The growing influence of the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA), which is targeted at the requirements for the next generation of carrier-grade communications equipment including telecom and data systems centers, is especially important. The ATCA architecture provides high levels of availability via redundancy and hot swapping techniques, which will provide a host of opportunities for embedded ac-dc power supplies.

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Microdisplays could soon be embedded in smartphones, allowing anyone to share content on just about any kind of screen.

Imagine you’re on a camping trip with your family, and your kids are bored. They want to watch a movie, but you forgot your laptop at home. Hopeless? Not at all.

You pull out your fifth-generation iPhone–yes, this is a story about future technology–power it up, aim it at the wall of the tent, and start projecting their favorite film there.

This is one of the many potential promises of a new microdisplay technology from Displaytech, a recently acquired division of Boise-based Micron. Known as FLCOS, or fast liquid crystal on silicon, the technology is designed to make it possible to project from a relatively small form factor device, and with high image quality and vibrant colors, just about anything you’d want, be it a Disney flick or a complex PowerPoint presentation.

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Embedded and electronic system design teams face the challenge of reducing development time and costs while improving quality, performance and functionality. However, increased system complexity is raising the cost of verification, in some cases to as much as 70 percent of the overall project cost. As verification consumes more time, it eliminates opportunities for engineers to create product differentiation through design optimization and to focus on innovation.

This problem manifests itself differently across industries:

• Engineers at electronics OEMs and suppliers try every possible verification technology, hoping to avoid the re-spin that will halt their race-to-market with the next generation device.

• Automotive and aerospace engineers conduct extensive design and code reviews to confirm software in dozens of embedded processors meets design requirements.

• Industrial automation engineers struggle to design and integrate increasingly complex control and mechatronic systems with hardware prototypes in the lab.

These scenarios share two common problems: the difficulty of determining whether designs and implementations meet requirements; and the waste involved with manual testing and rework. These challenges stem from fundamental workflow gaps across stages of development and disconnected tools used by component design teams. Even if each component is designed well and tested extensively, issues related to requirements and integration are often found towards the end of the development process.

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