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As smart technology advances by leaps and bounds, the benefits that outdoor surveillance can provide cities are virtually limitless. In fact, places like Singapore and Tokyo have already begun using outdoor surveillance technology to great effect. To get a better understanding of the state of the industry today, Tyler Kern invited Felisa Chuang, Product Manager, RF, Antennas at TE Connectivity, onto the Connected World podcast. She has been with the company for 13 years and has seen the market progress from WiFi to 3G, 4G, and, finally, 5G.

Electronics’ increasing role in today’s society requires the assurance of reliability and functionality of such devices through test & measurement (T&M). Connected World tapped Ryan Chen, Global Product Manager, Board to Board, for TE Connectivity for updates and insights on the latest trends in the T&M industry. “Before electronics reach end-users, they must be well designed and validated by test & measurement equipment,” Chen said. “Without test and measurement, development, and production of any of these electronic devices are impossible.” One of the significant trends Chen sees taking place in the T&M industry is digitalization. “Advances in technology such as 5G, IoT, cloud computing, and others, are quickly driving this quickly growing trend,” Chen said. “For example, 5G plays an important role in virtualization and automation, which we believe are two long-term trends in the test and measurement market.” With every new trend in the industry comes a new challenge for engineers to tackle. According to Chen, the increase in digitalization is making electronic devices more and more complicated. “This means more functions need testing,” Chen said. “But on the other hand, the customer is asking for shorter and shorter test times to save test costs.” So, engineers' challenge is to design testing equipment that can perform more and more functions at a reduced test time, which will ultimately drive down costs.

It’s difficult to think of a technology more utilized than Wi-Fi, especially in a year that’s brought a sweeping transition to work-from-home and put a microscope on everyone’s home networks. Plenty of families have been sent scrambling, trying to figure out how to have enough bandwidth for mom taking a Zoom meeting, children doing remote learning and dad streaming a show at the same time. But, a lot of times, it seems like the current setup is as good as it gets. While it’s easy to see Wi-Fi as a static technology since it has become so ubiquitous in its current form, Christopher Li [https://marketscale.com/industries/contributors/christopher-li/], Product Manager for Antennas at TE Connectivity [https://www.te.com/global-en/home.html], said big advances are coming. “There are actually significant changes coming to Wi-Fi, but these changes you should think of as additions. The latest Wi-Fi standard typically will be backward-compatible with previous generations,” he said. “The next step will be Wi-Fi 6E – E stands for extended.” That will allow for multi-user, multiple-input, multiple-output technology, with a router able to communicate with devices at the same time in a way that should boost speeds on a network. While that is exciting, Li cautioned the technology won’t be here tomorrow, so people considering a router upgrade should go ahead and take that step rather than hold out for a wide rollout of the next generation. “It’ll probably become more common in 2022. To experience the 6-gigahertz band, we’ll need 6E enabled devices and access points,” he said. “There’s always going to be new technology around the corner, but we should probably decide based on our current and projected needs.”

One area that is growing in importance for wireless IoT is the quality of service. Christian Koehler [https://marketscale.com/industries/contributors/christopher-koehler/], Manager of Product Management for RF Solutions at TE Connectivity [https://www.te.com/usa-en/home.html], spoke about the various challenges facing wireless IoT in this super-connected world. Costs, scalability, security and ecosystem are all areas of concern for wireless IoT providers, Koehler said. “There is also the complexity of antenna design,” Koehler said. “Antennas are different from regular passive components. There is a tendency to ignore this complexity and treat antennas like any other component. And the next challenge is the understanding of RF requirements. How do I know my antenna is good enough today, and more importantly, how do I know it’s good enough tomorrow?” With the exponential growth in wireless IoT, so grows interference issues. How are today’s wireless engineers navigating these choppy waters to provide solutions with so many different concerns? “The most advanced engineering groups are in the area of smartphones and wireless handhelds like tablets and even laptops,” Koehler said. Proper antenna development for those devices is crucial to get right. And Koehler mentioned three vital elements for a design cycle for the new development of a device. There needs to be a clear definition of RF requirements, an understanding of how the device will operate under the worst-case field conditions and an overall understanding of its conditions. These elements will determine the type of antenna the device will require. “And this makes clear,” Koehler added, “the antenna cannot be designed at the end of a design cycle. It should be considered at the beginning.”

Everyone knows the term artificial intelligence, or AI,, and some may understand the impact it has on their lives to varying degrees. But what exactly is AI, and what role is it playing today and into the future? At TE Connectivity [https://www.te.com/usa-en/home.html], Chris Blackburn [https://marketscale.com/industries/contributors/chris-blackburn/], Technologist on the System Architecture Team, helped break down artificial intelligence for host Tyler Kern. “AI is everywhere around us in the world,” Blackburn said. “Most of us are familiar with devices in our homes, such as voice assistance like Alexa and Siri. Artificial intelligence is a way for machines to learn and generate data by themselves.” Up to now, the majority of use cases for AI could be found in the marketing realm to find ways for the right products to reach the right consumers based on consumer behavior on social media and in eCommerce shopping. “Recommendation engines are one of those primary use cases,” Blackburn said. Blackburn said AI is beginning to show up in oil and gas exploration, mining and natural resource extraction, farming, and food production. One of the benefits of AI is its ability to learn from new data, make inferences based on previous data and continue to get smarter. But with advancements come new challenges to solve. How can we store and transfer massive amounts of data and make it accessible to these machines for learning? “In the past, 10 to 20 years ago, a lot of the data created in the world was human-generated,” Blackburn said. “And, now, we’re moving into this era of machine-generated data. It’s an absolute data explosion, and it is certainly influencing how we’re building system architecture to handle it.”