Short Range Wireless

e-Report

May 2007

In This Issue:

COMPANY NEWS

Short-Range Wireless Technologies Square off at Technical Conference
Wireless Sensor Networks Offer Efficiencies and Savings for Industrial Process Monitoring
Tyco Electronics and OATSystems Form Alliance to Provide Comprehensive RFID Solutions
GE Sensing Selects Dust Networks as Technology Partner for Wireless Sensing Solutions

PRODUCT NEWS

Moteiv Launches Industry’s Smalles Mote Module with Interface for Cell Phones, PDAs, and Other Mobile Devices
TechnoCom Launches DSRC Access Point Solution
TriBee – Wireless Communication for Industrial Use and Home Automation
Tyco Electronics Introduces Rugged RFID Antenna

EVENT LISTING

2007 Antenna Systems Conference / 2007 Short-Range Wireless Conference

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COMPANY NEWS
Short-Range Wireless Technologies Square off at Technical Conference The 2007 Short-Range Wireless Conference, again co-located with the 2007 Antenna Systems Conference, will feature 40 technical sessions from today’s leaders in wireless technology. Attendees will have the opportunity to network with technical experts and ultimately discover how new developments will impact their product performance. Featured sessions include: • WiMedia: The Ultra-Platform for Wireless Multimedia Jon Rosdahl, Vice President, WiMedia Alliance (Principal Engineer, Samsung) • WLAN Interference Casts Doubts on Zigbee, IEEE 802.15.4 Bernd Grohmann, Senior Director, Product Management, Zensys • Uniting the Wireless PAN with Bluetooth Technology Dr. Mike Foley, Executive Director, Bluetooth SIG, Inc. • Antenna and Propagation Considerations for RFID Systems Dr. Warren Stutzman, Founding Director, Virginia Tech Antenna Group • Ubiquitous RFID: It's Not Just For Walmart Anymore Sayan Chakraborty, CTO, SkyeTek Get Detailed Program Information - http://www.antennasonline.com/ast07_program.html Register Before May 25th & Save $300 - http://www.antennasonline.com/ast07_reg.html Contact Jeremy Martin with questions! Wireless Sensor Networks Offer Efficiencies and Savings for Industrial Process Monitoring Those who remember the night of December 2, 1984, when water accidentally entered a methylisocyanate storage tank at a Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, will understand the importance of monitoring industrial processes. Gauges measuring temperature and pressure were known to be unreliable, so staff ignored early signs of trouble and a cloud of toxic gas rolled across the crowded working-class district. In what has been called the world's worst industrial accident, at least 3000 died and hundreds of thousands were injured. The factory was subsequently shut down. Clearly, reliable industrial monitoring systems are critical, and according to ABI Research senior analyst Sam Lucero, "Wireless monitoring systems increase the number of monitoring points that you can deploy. You can get more information about your processes, using fewer employees, and without having to check instrument readings manually." A new study from ABI Research analyzes the global market for wireless, networked industrial monitoring. Two of the leading wired industrial monitoring system vendors — Emerson and Honeywell — have introduced wireless monitoring technology, and more wireless product introductions are expected in the next few years from other vendors, as well. Furthermore, a wireless extension to the ubiquitous HART protocol, which is the basis of most industrial monitoring networks, is expected this summer, along with an ISA SP-100.11a standard expected in 2008, and "industrial-grade" ZigBee trying to gain traction. Although this is an intrinsically cautious industry, notes Lucero, "We do expect a fairly strong growth rate, owing to the financial benefits and ease of deployment wireless technology provides. We saw about 100,000 802.15.4 chipsets going into the industrial sector in 2006; that will rise to almost five million in 2012. Some of that growth will be based on replacement of wired process monitoring nodes, some will be from an increase in total process monitoring nodes enabled by the use of wireless technology, and some will be growth due to the use of wireless technology in condition monitoring applications." ABI Research's Wireless Sensor Networking (WSN) in Industrial Automation analyzes: the market opportunity for WSN in industrial deployments, detailing where it will find traction (and where it will not); the implications of the key standards efforts including Wireless HART, Sp-100.11a, and "industrial" ZigBee; the implications WSN adoption will have for the market; and the key players involved in making WSN a reality in industrial automation. It forms part of two ABI Research Services, M2M and Short-Range Wireless. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com. Tyco Electronics and OATSystems Form Alliance to Provide Comprehensive RFID Solutions Tyco Electronics has announced a strategic alliance with OATSystems to provide a series of radio frequency identification (RFID) solutions to a variety of vertical markets that include aerospace and defense, transportation, and industrial segments. “Customers are looking for RFID system solutions that eliminate the tedious and risky integration that comes with working with multiple suppliers,” said Eric Freid, director of international business development for RFID products at Tyco Electronics. “They want a single-source provider with the products and experience to bring scalable, low-risk RFID capabilities to their operations. By aligning with OATSystems, Tyco Electronics can now offer its customers the best of both worlds: solutions from the leader in RFID enabled software applications combined with Tyco Electronics’ extensive services and hardware.” OATSystems software covers the entire RFID process from tagging to data capture and analysis. With over two-hundred deployments, OAT’s solutions incorporate the industry’s best practices and proven uses cases enabling organizations to deploy solutions in less time, with less risk. Its software solutions incorporate a visual, easy to use high level tooling capability enabling customers to create, modify and adapt processing to meet their specific needs quickly and easily. Whether a business needs to track assets or has a work-in-process application, OAT can integrate data from heterogeneous tag sources including passive, active and sensory tags. This integration opens the door for business users to gain visibility into inventory and asset movement throughout their entire supply chains from multiple geographically dispersed facilities and across multiple trading partners. Tyco Electronics will provide the RFID labels, readers, antennas, and the integration and support expertise to enable companies at any stage of RFID deployment to do so efficiently and effectively. For more information visit www.tycoelectronics.com. GE Sensing Selects Dust Networks as Technology Partner for Wireless Sensing Solutions GE Sensing, the sensing business of the General Electric Company and Dust Networks, a provider of reliable, low-power wireless sensor networking (WSN) systems, have formed a technology partnership to build dynamic, flexible wireless sensing solutions for a range of monitoring applications. GE Sensing will use Dust Networks’ embedded WSN products to provide GE customers with reliable, cost-effective wireless solutions to monitor and validate critical processes in a range of industries, including pharmaceutical, biotechnology, automotive, industrial, commercial, petrochemical and power generation. “We evaluated many wireless technologies and ultimately chose Dust Networks’ Time Synchronized Mesh Protocol (TSMP)-based products,” said Mark Kingsley, chief marketing officer at GE Sensing. “We believe Dust Networks is the only company that can provide the reliability and power consumption critical to our customers’ success. The ability to offer our customers a way to quickly and accurately gather information from multiple points will help them meet the growing regulatory challenges, leading to cost savings.” “We’re very excited to partner with GE Sensing to develop products that are highly reliable, provide ease of installation and operate on low power,” said Joy Weiss, CEO of Dust Networks. “As an enabling technology, WSN is ushering in a new information revolution, providing quick, reliable access to information from the physical world that was previously out of economic reach. Our partnership with GE has resulted in a product that delivers cost savings, energy reduction and increased efficiency benefits to end users.” GE’s new Kaye RF ValProbe is the first product to be introduced from the GE and Dust Networks partnership. The RF ValProbe offers operators the option to view data in real time without the need or cost of wiring, and the ability to collect historical data from remote loggers. This feature is invaluable for verifying system setup prior to studies, or for verifying status at critical times during studies. The ValProbe system consists of RF wireless loggers, a base station and software. Data can be collected from many loggers and distributed over a wide area. Dust Networks’ TSMP-based mesh networking technology ensures that no data is lost by permitting loggers to route data to another logger for subsequent forwarding if the direct path to the base station is blocked. For more information visit www.dustnetworks.com
PRODUCT NEWS
Moteiv Launches Industry’s Smalles Mote Module with Interface for Cell Phones, PDAs, and Other Mobile Devices Moteiv Corp., a wireless sensor network solutions provider, has unveiled the most recent member of its Tmote product family, the Moteiv Tmote Mini. The Tmote Mini is a wireless sensor network node, or “mote” that supports the ZigBee specification and is packaged in an industry-standard miniSDIO form factor. The ultra-compact form factor allows for immediate integration of the Tmote Mini “mote core” into devices such as cell phones, PDAs and other mobile products. Demand for instant access to physical data is becoming essential to people’s everyday lives and the need for easy to use wireless sensor network (WSN) technology is greater than ever. WSNs are currently being deployed into a wide array of applications in the agriculture/environmental, healthcare, defense, transportation, supply-chain logistics and industrial automation markets. Tmote Mini fosters this growth by dramatically expanding the number of platforms that can be WSN-enabled quickly and easily. "One of the largest WSN headaches is gaining access to sensor data in the field and then making sense of it by accessing backend and middleware sensor services,” said Mareca Hatler, director of Research and senior market analyst with On World. “Solutions are starting to emerge such as mobile gateways and mobile WSN development systems to address this growing opportunity." "Tmote Mini allows our customers to design wireless network solutions with greater in-field capability than ever before,” said Rick Schell, chief executive officer of Moteiv Corp. "This product was developed as a direct result of customer feedback and their demand to create applications that rely less on tethered IT infrastructure and more on mobile devices such as cell phones. Tmote Mini’s widely known industry-standard miniSDIO form factor not only enables this critical mobile functionality, it also eases integration, reduces cost, and speeds time-to-market in deployments worldwide.” For more information visit www.moteiv.com TechnoCom Launches DSRC Access Point Solution TechnoCom Corp., a provider of 5.9 GHz Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) technologies for Vehicle Integration Infrastructure (VII) applications, has launched its Multiband Configurable Networking Unit (MCNU), an Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) 802.11a/b/g and p compliant wireless router simultaneously supporting 4.9 GHz public safety, 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz municipal Wi-Fi and 5.9 GHz DSRC network applications. The MCNU wireless router supports industry common protocols for vehicle communications operating within FCC licensed 5.9 GHz DSRC and is compliant with IEEE DSRC/Wireless Access in a Vehicular Environment (WAVE) set of standards designed for the transportation and automotive industries, including 802.11p, 1609.2, 1609.3, and 1609.4. “Public networks and VII applications have the capability to improve traffic congestion and reduce the number of deaths and injuries on the road,” said Masoud Motamedi, president of TechnoCom. “TechnoCom’s technology in the MCNU offers an unprecedented value proposition for operators of municipal wireless networks.” The MCNU is one solution in a suite of expanding wireless communications software solutions and services from TechnoCom’s Mobility Solutions group that enables local, regional or national wireless communication networks – whether in licensed or unlicensed frequency bands. The MCNU supports secure, anonymous applications for mobile communications for municipalities, agencies at all levels of government and the public safety, automotive and transportation industries. “Not only does TechnoCom’s technology support VII and cooperative intersection collision avoidance systems (CICAS) that can help a driver approaching an intersection recognize the state of activities within that intersection and enhance safe passage through the intersection, but it also supports standard wireless internet applications such as web browsing, email and secure remote access to intranets,” added Motamedi. For more information visit www.technocom-wireless.com TriBee – Wireless Communication for Industrial Use and Home Automation The first European communication platform based on ZigBee technology Tritech Technology AB, a solutions company specializing in wireless systems, is now launching the first European communication platform based on the ZigBee standard. The product family in question is known as TriBee. Tritech feels it can make significant contributions to the development of industrial and domestic wireless communication in the north European market. The development of wireless remote control systems has been rapid in recent years. In 2004, a new global standard for wireless network communication, ZigBee, was developed. Additional functions are constantly being added to the standard and several packaged solutions are now available. For companies on the European market, TriBee provides immediate access to a ZigBee-based communication platform. TriBee is a ready-packaged communication platform that covers USB drives, gateways, routers and RF modules. While increasing flexibility and, in particular, cutting costs, the TriBee platform can replace complicated and expensive cable-based installations. “TriBee differs in many ways from competing communication platforms based on other standards such as Bluetooth. TriBee is more energy-efficient and also has a considerably more advanced network structure. This enables thousands of nodes to interact in a single network,” explains Mattias Wide, Product Manager, Tritech. There are both industrial and domestic TriBee applications. Examples includes the controlling and monitoring of, amongst other things, lights, electricity meters, water meters, heating systems and various electrically operated devices. Using TriBee, just one keypad is all that a user requires to have all a building's lighting systems and electrical equipment at his or her fingertips. For industry, applications that control delicate equipment and communicate with monitoring and security systems can be added to the foregoing examples. “For all these types of communication systems, simplicity is one of TriBee’s main competitive edges,” said Mattias Wide. “TriBee is extremely simple to fit retrospectively. Very often it is just a question of installing small, battery-operated, radio transmitters. For more information visit www.tritech.se Tyco Electronics Introduces Rugged RFID Antenna Tyco Electronics has expanded its RFID solutions product family with the introduction of a new line of rugged RFID antennas for use in baler and compactor RFID applications. The M/A-COM MAAN-000210-AT0000 is a linear polarized antenna with a high density polyethylene radome that provides quality protection from constant abrasion and a neoprene gasket to prevent liquids from infiltrating the antenna – all well suited for use in baler and compactor applications. “The versatility of new RFID technology solutions have opened a number of exciting opportunities around the globe where RFID-enabled products can offer new, flexible applications and we at Tyco Electronics are excited to play a key role in the evolution of this new market,” said John Akins, product manager, Tyco Electronics M/A-COM RFID products. “Our new ruggedized antenna was specifically designed for baler and compactor applications. It provides 100 percent interior coverage, with minimal over-reads and can withstand the demands of rigorous use and wear-and-tear.” The M/A-COM MAAN-000210-AT0000 antennas operate with a typical gain of 2.5 dB, have a beamwidth of 130° at 3 dB, and have a typical VSWR (Voltage Standing Wave Radio) of 1.5:1. Multi-directional conduit access holes and a removable connector access panel are available for a more efficient installation procedure. The connector housing is removable for use in NEMA (National Electrical Manufacturer’s Association) enclosures. For more information visit www.tycoelectronics.com
EVENT LISTING
2007 Antenna Systems Conference / 2007 Short-Range Wireless Conference September 26-27 • Hyatt Regency Tech Center • Denver, Colo. This two-day technical conference will focus on the latest advancements in antenna systems & technology and short-range wireless standards, applications & technology. View the conference program online at http://www.antennasonline.com/ast07_program.html
JOB LISTING

Upcoming Industry Events - Click here to view full Calendar
June 2007 4-7 - Antennas: Principles, Design & Measurements Short Course Annapolis, MD 3-8 - IEEE RFIC Symposium, Honolulu, Hawaii 5-8 - IEEE MTTS, Honolulu, Hawaii 11-13 - Sensors Expo, Rosemont, Ill. 11-13 - In-Building Wireless 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada 11-14 - Wireless Comm Association 2007, Washington, D.C. 18-21 - *NXTComm, (formerly GlobalComm) Chicago, Ill.* 25-27 - Military Radar, Arlington, Virg.
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