e.Digital Corporation (fka EDIG)

[Tinroad]

You select the MP3 files displayed on your voice-activated PDA and transmit them from your home entertainment system to your car stereo. As you prepare to leave the house, your refrigerator alerts your handheld that you're out of a few staples.

When you reach your car, the air conditioning unit has already cooled the interior to 70°, and the music files you had been listening to are installed. As you pull out of the driveway, your GPS system warns you that there is an accident nearby and suggests an alternate route that is uploaded to your car's dashboard display.

This isn't science fiction, but representative of a host of applications OEMs are beginning to deploy using smart ICs. These devices, which typically take the form of microcontrollers linked to an IP network, may cost more than most consumers are willing to pay today. But the added value made possible by intelligent ICs and the information services they enable could someday rival the conventional market for microcontrollers, according to observers.

"Currently there are hundreds of millions of microcontrollers," said Richard Doherty, an analyst at the Envisioneering Group, Seaford, N.Y. "As the deployment of microcontrollers continues to grow, it will increasingly make sense to incorporate them into a network."

According to Doherty, 2000 represented a "crossover" point for smart ICs, although the number of smart-IC applications is difficult to quantify. Where such devices once worked quietly behind the scenes in applications such as automotive engine and industrial motor control, "post-2000 designers changed [the market], so now you have hundreds of millions of ICs that have begun to [behave as] social animals," Doherty said.

In the U.S. home appliance market alone, as much as 15% of the 40 million units expected to ship in 2005 will include some kind of network-connected microcontroller, according to Allied Business Intelligence Inc., Oyster Bay, N.Y.

A smart-IC platform typically includes an embedded sensor, actuator, transducer, and a memory component combined with an RF device wired or linked wirelessly to a network. Power and other capabilities vary: an 8-bit controller in an air conditioner may be connected to a wireline network, a home server, and a repair service. The Web server might have a 64-bit processor with a Bluetooth interface or an 802.11 connection to devices throughout the home and car.

Protocols and other issues

Despite the smart IC's relatively simple structure, a lack of standard protocols, power issues, and price constraints must be addressed before the market can realize its full potential.

"It isn't so much a chip problem but a protocol issue," said Russ Lange, an IBM Corp. fellow and chief technology officer at IBM Microelectronics in East Fishkill, N.Y. "You and I can speak English together, but if we had someone speaking Swahili on the phone we would get in trouble because we couldn't communicate. That's what the smart-IC world looks like now."

And cost issues still abound, particularly in the price-sensitive consumer market. Installing special software and devices to allow a PDA to connect to a garage door for $200 may make sense for the hobbyist, but would not be attractive to the average consumer.

"It has to get to the point where a light producer will not think twice about adding a [smart IC] for an extra 10 cents [per light]," Lange said.

Smart ICs have gained the most ground in the automotive sector, particularly in telematics applications. Telematics hardware will see global sales of $9 billion this year and $14 billion in 2004, according to Gartner Dataquest, San Jose.

Indeed, consumers already appear willing to pay a few hundred dollars more to outfit luxury automobiles with features such as driver information systems (DIS) and more advanced airbag sensors. Motorola Inc. expects that by 2010, 70% of all cars will contain some kind of DIS package.

To date, however, a slew of networking protocols exist to address separate auto subsystems. According to Motorola, telematics protocols include the car-area network, local interconnect network, and J1850 buses, originally developed for engine, power train, and body controls; MOST, FireWire, and the emerging mobileGT standard for entertainment, navigation, and communication devices; and FlexRay, an emerging protocol that aims to govern brake and steer-by-wire functions.

Still, smart ICs in telematics offer a quick return on investment despite the automotive industry's relatively long production cycles.

"In the car environment, the ubiquitous connectivity pays off almost immediately," said Fred Boekhorst, senior vice president at Philips Research Laboratories, Eindhoven, Netherlands. "Costs are saved by increased productivity; avoiding traffic jams with GPS capabilities translates into a lot of bucks."

Boekhorst estimated that up to 30% of the bill of materials (BOM) that make up brake systems, exhaust units, and other automotive subsystems will consist of electronic components in the next two years. "The functionality and ensuing cost savings for the automakers will only increase," he said.

Role of DSP

A key component in telematic smart-IC applications is the DSP, which, for example, can process analog-to-digital voice conversion in a noise-polluted car environment.

"Voice recognition in the connected car network has to work in a harsh environment, and the human interface, with the noise factor, is very complex," said David Maples, business development manager for the DSP group at Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas. "There's a significant amount of audio and noise-reduction processing with the human interface."

The DSP offers an adaptive process to deliver a signal output, Maples said. The DSP then refines the signal using acoustic cancellation algorithms to reduce background noise.

According to Peter Schulmeyer, a senior engineering manager at Motorola's advanced systems laboratory in Austin, Texas, the company's DSP-based chipset offers the requisite memory and processing power to serve as a viable voice-activated human-interface device in automobiles. The part includes 128Mbytes of SDRAM, an external bus, and an audio system with a 600¥800 LCD screen.

"We're still in the early stages of [smart ICs] in the car and elsewhere," Schulmeyer said. "But new vehicles being equipped with driver information systems are growing dramatically at a rate of over 30% a year."

Hurdles remain, however. In addition to the variety of noncompatible networking standards, circuitry in such connected subsystems must often be reconfigured from automaker to automaker.

"An oil light on a car sending a signal to a microcontroller might be one thing in a GM car but different in a Mercedes," IBM's Lange said. "All these sensors create useful data, but how do you translate this Tower of Babel into something the circuits all understand?"

TCP/IP comes to the fore

The industrial sector, which has been an early but low-volume adopter of intelligent ICs, has also been the slowest sector to resolve the protocol issue, said William Peisel, chief technology officer at NetSilicon Inc., Waltham, Mass.

"In the world of industrial automation, where everyone has been speaking about openness, sharing information, and connectivity, the sector still represents a bunch of islands of proprietary protocols," Peisel said. "But we do see that TCP/IP is beginning to be a popular connectivity software protocol. Even in the world of industrial automation, they're beginning to port some of their proprietary protocols and beginning to tunnel them inside TCP/IP."

Though too bulky to include in a $30 "smart" toaster oven, the robust Internet software stack is relatively cost-compatible with industrial applications, even if it can tax the computing power of an 8-bit microcontroller, according to Peisel.

"With simple TCP/IP, you can probably get away with 8- and 16-bit microcontrollers," he said. "But when you try to write code for general-purpose Web servers-and especially when you try to implement applications for the next generation of Web servers-most of the smaller microcontrollers run out of address space and processing power."

The consumer market may not embrace the TCP/IP protocol as actively, however, because of its impact on the BOM.

"TCP/IP is a good protocol, but it requires so much processing power and so much cost that you no longer have a 20-cent chip but possibly a $10 chip," IBM's Lange said.

Moreover, though microcontrollers for embedded applications are currently employable at little cost, the radio components for wireless connections to an IP-based LAN are still too expensive, Maples said.

RF devices that connect to cheap, 8-bit microcontrollers in less-sophisticated appliances such as blenders or hair dryers must reach a price threshold of 10 cents, according to Philips' Boekhorst. He predicted that it could be about five years before the BOM for low-end RISC devices reaches acceptable levels of 20 cents for the microcontroller and radio device, 10 cents for the battery, and 10 cents for packaging.

Beyond Bluetooth

Though the emerging Bluetooth wireless standard is on the short list of many OEMs hoping to build interconnected home-based gateways, Lange said the standard that enables low-level RISC devices to wirelessly transmit data in the home will likely be based on what he called "son of Bluetooth."

"Bluetooth is good for what it was designed for, but we need something even smaller, lighter weight, and simpler for [home-based smart-IC applications]," Lange said.

New dedicated silicon for radio devices is a step in the right direction, according to Boekhorst, who noted that researchers are proposing to the IEEE a ZigBee standard as a Bluetooth replacement that operates at 2.4GHz. "At a rate of 250Kbytes/s, ZigBee is ideal because it consumes [almost half as much] power as Bluetooth, which [typically] consumes more than 50 milliwatts," he said.

Learning curve

There are other problems, however, given that most OEMs making household appliances are not well versed in networking technologies such as Ethernet.

"They need to pick up networking expertise and have to [learn to] work with silicon suppliers," Peisel said. "So there is a technological jump that these OEMs have to make. They first have to develop it, then sell the idea to the general public, which has not yet totally bought into the idea of connected devices."

In the shorter term, this means that smart ICs are likely to show up in home appliances that ordinarily retail for $300 and up, according to Peisel. "What will happen is that OEMs will start designing their devices around microprocessors that will give them the best value for their connectivity and where the extra cost is less noticed by the consumer," he said.

From the consumer market perspective, the real value that smart ICs represent for users and OEMs alike may be the added value they provide for improving aftersales services, according to Doug Heintzman, manager of strategy and standards at IBM's Pervasive Computing Division in Somers, N.Y.

"It will be great to control your air conditioner from anywhere in the world with your cell phone," Heintzman said. "But in the business case, the value proposition is the fact that the air conditioner can call out to the service bureau and say that the refrigerator coolant is malfunctioning, describe the part that needs to be fixed, and what needs to be done."

http://www.ebnonline.com/story/OEG20020308S0067