CASS-Wide Webinar Talk IV: "Ubiquitous, Seamless, and Future Proofed: How Wireless Circuits Can Push IoT"

In 2021 the number of IoT devices reached 46 billion, a 200% increase over the number in 2016*.  By 2030 this number is expected to jump to 125 billion.   While the FCC and other regulators have added licensed and unlicensed spectrum across several bands over the past few years to accommodate these new users, the need for increased wireless capacity and radios that can quickly adapt to new standards remains.  Needless to say, the RF circuit designer has a significant role to play in solving these problems. 

As the market continues to grow, regulating bodies in various countries will undoubtedly continue to work to free up and reallocate spectrum and users will continue to find more ways to use that spectrum.  Users will need both short-reach and low-power IoT devices that can operate independently and share spectrum as well as new WiFi and cellular radios that can quickly adapt to new environments and standards.  

In this talk, I will look at two approaches to these related problems that require unconventional radio designs. First, I will look at an approach from the network side, of how to use a hardware support to build functional mesh networks that can communicate point-to-point in a scalable fashion.  Using such radios can reduce communication bottlenecks in centralized systems as well as enable more devices and sensors with greater flexibility.  The second part of the talk will examine how to add flexibility to the RF front end itself to accommodate changing standards and environments while keeping design and circuit costs low.   I will show techniques for both broadband and tunable narrowband systems that can enable flexibility while maintaining high performance.  With these examples, I will discuss the potential for future flexible analog RF designs and the current limits of this approach.