Viewpoints

David Hollander, of the Bluetooth SIG, considers how Bluetooth LE Audio enables those suffering from hearing loss to take advantage of the same benefits enjoyed by users of standard wireless headphones and earbuds. Over 5% of the world’s population are affected by hearing loss – by 2050, nearly 2.5 billion people are projected to have some degree of hearing loss. Closer ...

Power over Ethernet (PoE) is rapidly gaining market share, in some rather unexpected places, writes Philip Lechner of Avnet Abacus. In fact, for a technology with relatively humble origins, PoE is shaping up very well indeed. A recent report from ResearchAndMarkets.com predicts that the global market for Power Over Ethernet (PoE) Solutions will reach $1.1 Billion by 2025, hitting a 10.8% ...

Sonos alleged that Google’s smart speaker devices infringed its US patents, and the ITC has agreed. But who will be the winner from this patent dispute, asks Michael Jaeger, a partner and patent attorney at Withers & Rogers? Following the conclusion of a long-standing legal battle, Sonos has emerged victorious to block the import into the US of Google’s smart speaker ...

In an IoT network, even if a server and its assets are secured, there may be millions of sensors connected to it, and each of these is an open window into its core. Until the security industry puts more focus on hardware security at the edge, vulnerabilities will abound, argues Dr. Shahram Mossayebi of Crypto Quantique. In the old world, ...

In a high-profile US court action, Tesla is suing its Silicon Valley rival, Rivian, for the alleged theft of “highly-proprietary trade secrets”, writes Diego Black a partner and patent attorney in Withers & Rogers. According to court papers submitted by Tesla since the case was filed last year, it is alleged that over 70 employees have been poached by Rivian; ...

How quantum technologies can be tested and evaluated for commercialisation is explained by Dr Rhys Lewis, Head of NPL’s Quantum Metrology Institute. The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) is the UK’s National Metrology Institute and home to the Quantum Metrology Institute (QMI). The QMI brings together all of NPL’s cutting-edge quantum science and metrology research and provides the expertise and facilities ...

With unprecedented demands on high-bandwidth memory (HBM), Richard Walsh of Samsung Semiconductor Europe considers what the industry needs to do for the next generation of memory technology. The wonder that is HBM has been on a steady journey over the past few years. Performance, power efficiency and speed have all improved incrementally over time. Until recently, this progress has been ...

Andy Conway, sales manager at military embedded system specialist Recab UK, looks at the critical technologies at the edge of the battlefield and beyond, such as the Ethernet-based HSR, PRP and TSN protocols. Technology becomes more important to military and defence operations with each passing year. We need only look to the UK Government’s recent Defence Command paper and budget ...

Geoff Schulteis, an antenna applications specialist with Antenova, considers the challenges of antenna placement for new wireless designs with 5G. 5G offers the advantage of greater data throughput and lower latency, and will enable a host of new mobile applications, for example in broadcast, robotics, Augmented Reality, Autonomous Driver Assisted Systems (ADAS), vehicle telematics, remote surgery and Cloud computing. There ...

Martin Woolley, Senior Developer Relations Manager, EMEA, at Bluetooth SIG, considers how Bluetooth technology operates to mitigate interference and increase reliability, with adaptive frequency hopping (AFH). Wireless communication systems usually employ radio as the underlying, physical basis for getting data from one device to another. Bluetooth itself is a radio communications technology. But there’s a problem. Radio is undeniably, unambiguously, ...