Hartcourt Companies (fka HRCT)

[Tin-Berrygood]

Last post< then sleep...I post this because it's interesting and on the China Info site (Chinese version) Agilent has their add directly below Sinobull's add...Not that there is a relationship, I just keep an eye out...You know?


http://www.chinainfo.com.cn/

One on One with Thomas Saponas, CTO of Agilent Technologies
Daniel S. Levine
Agilent Technologies might not be a household name, but if you cracked open a cell phone, chances are you will find a component inside made by the company. Use a telephone, and chances are your voice travels over an Agilent component at some point along its journey.

At the end of 1999, Hewlett-Packard divided its business into two separate companies. H-P retained the computer and printer business and a newly formed Agilent took the test and measurement, semiconductor products, health care and chemical analysis businesses.

Thomas Saponas, chief technology officer for Agilent, oversees a $1.2 billion-a-year research and development budget for the Palo Alto company.

Though Agilent's business extends into many industries, its technology is ubiquitous in the telecommunications industry. Its components are in telecommunications networks, in handsets and its test equipment is used through the development and maintenance of both. And, with the convergence of voice, data and video and the emergence of wireless data services, Agilent is putting considerable R&D effort into allowing all of this on devices that are faster, cheaper and smaller.

Saponas started out with H-P in 1972 in the company's automatic measurement division, where he rose in R&D management positions.

In 1986, he was selected to serve as a White House Fellow in Washington, D.C. Saponas returned a year later to H-P, where he managed R&D for the electronic instruments group. He later rose to become general manager within the group. And, in 1999, Agilent named Saponas chief technology officer.

Business Times technology and telecom reporter Daniel S. Levine recently spoke to Saponas about where Agilent is putting its R&D dollars, gee-whiz products on the horizon and the future of telecommunications.

Q: Within Agilent's R&D budget, how much is going into communications today?

We don't break it out, but certainly it's the largest portion of our R&D. Greater than 50 percent goes to either devices or test equipment on the communications side.

Q: Is there an overriding theme to what you are doing in that area?

In communications, the dominant plays have to do with how to move more bits faster and cheaper. It's as simple as that. It's a simple price-performance play coming up with the methodologies that enable a continuous increase in the amount of data that can be transmitted for the same amount of money. The demand is insatiable for the transmission of data and that exists both in the wireline or the fixed environment and in the mobile environment.

Q: What kinds of new developments do you see coming out of the lab and working themselves into parts of our everyday lives?

One clear everyday reality, which is already here, but not widespread, is that people are going to use their cell phones as cameras. People are going to take pictures and communicate to their friends. `Here's a picture of who's with me. Here's a picture of me. Here's a picture of where I am and I'm lost. This is what it looks like. Can you tell me how to get to your house?'

Q: Do you envision mobile video conferencing or are cell phone cameras just going to be a function so people can have the convenience of always having a camera with them?

The real advantage will be to transmit a still picture. You can do real-time, but still pictures are certainly in the offering right now and for a bunch of social reasons.

Q: What are some of those?

Can you imagine a group of teenage boys and girls talking on a cell phone wanting to show who is with them at the time? `Oh, Joe is here. See, here is Joe,' and there's a big giggle and here's the picture of Joe. Taking it more seriously, imagine meeting a long, lost friend and calling up someone and saying, `Hey, guess who I just met at the airport?' Pictures communicate so much more than words. Just look at text messages vs. how we are doing everything so visually over the Internet. Indeed, email is a big part of it, but the vast majority of data flowing across the Internet is pictures. Our most powerful sense clearly is visual. It's like feeding it through a straw when you read text. I know you don't want to hear that as an author, but it's true.

Q: Talking about feeding it through a straw, that's what you are doing with this data. How much wider do the pipes have to get to make pictures a lot more useable in these various mediums -- particularly wireless?

You can send a pretty nice picture that is only 20 kilobytes on a modest display. On current cell phones, you can transmit that in about two seconds.

Q: How big a change will the next generation of cell phones bring to that?

If third-generation phones are running a megabit and all of a sudden now you can send 10 of those pictures a second, you really start getting full motion. You probably remember when they talked about television phones. That technology is going to be real and it's probably going to be real first in portable phones.

Q: I imagine then that the Dick Tracy wrist watch with full video won't be far behind. Do you see that on the horizon?

That's something that isn't going to happen in five years, but boy it isn't really hard to imagine that that is within a 20-year horizon. But you have to ask what is the driving force, and the driving force is that people like to see faces. There's so much more information with a picture than with a voice or text and that's driving the need for bit speed.

Q: How do you see the changes to the technology changing the way we use these devices?

The big change always gets down to cost. It always gets down to moving the technology down to the level where more people can afford it. If you look at the radical change in computers, it was the change in cost and performance. That's what made it so people wanted to have computers. Utility went up relative to the cost.

Q: And you see that happening with what next?

Price is established with cell phones. There's kind of a threshold as to what people are willing to pay, so what happens is you keep adding capabilities that will add value. So while there are people talking about disposable cell phones to the extent that the technology lets the simplest devices become less expensive, it's more a matter of increasing utility and capability with the cost. That's the big change and it's not just cell phones. I happen to be a big believer that the fixed Internet will continue to be a very powerful driving force even though everything is going wireless. There are tremendous advantages to a piece of fiber-optic cable. The capability of what you can transmit over fiber compared to wireless is different by factors of at least a billion and it might be a trillion compared to a portable device.

Q: I don't know how soon I'll have fiber running into my house, but when that happens, will we start seeing video-on-demand and those kinds of alternatives?

Oh, sure. Already cable systems are being installed with fiber optics. You have fiber optics on the street. It's a question of does it make sense to run the fiber into your home or if there is enough bandwidth in the existing coaxial cable running into your home? It turns out there is probably enough bandwidth. And it turns out the thing that requires the least bandwidth and the least capabilities is your telephone. That, in fact, is one of the interesting structural dynamics in the marketplace.

Q: What do you mean?

Have you ever thought about the fact that you pay $20 a month for your Internet connection and you can get on for four hours one evening and spend nothing but time downloading information from European or Asian web sites and there is no charge? Try and do that by placing a long-distance call to Europe for four hours and see if there is no charge. We are really struggling with the business model for how we should appropriately pay for this. What is clear is the demand is there for the capability and our contribution is that we are going to continue to drive down the cost of the capability.

Q: Are there some price points that become magical?

No. There is gain at every step of the way.

Q: Is there some type of Moore's Law being proven out on the network side?

You hear lots of numbers, but the price-performance equivalent of Moore's Law in communications is rather than doubling every two or three years it's on a cycle of every year. It's going at a much faster rate. Some of these devices like the transceivers have come down from a $1,000 to less than $50 -- a 20-to-1 change in price. Hundreds of thousands, even millions a month are being built. There are very few PCs that have on the back on them a fiber-optic transceiver, but that's going to change. Fiber is just a very inexpensive and high performance way of transmitting data.

Q: We've talked a bit about speed and cost, but is Agilent also working to reduce the size of devices?

Every time you see a phone get smaller, it's possible we played a role in it. Increasing the battery life on phones is a very big deal. There are a bunch of little things that people take for granted. Part of what is important to make a phone smaller is to have a smaller battery because it runs more efficiently. We developed a line of transmitters -- the output stage that sends the signal out of your cell phone, the primary power consumer -- we developed a transistor that reduces the power requirement and is more efficient.

Q: It's certainly been a rough time for the Lucents, Ciscos and the likes, but it also seems continued innovation is critical to the expansion of the applications and markets for communications technology. Are R&D budgets generally holding here or are they suffering with the downturn?

We certainly are seeing the same high level of R&D in our customers. It's something these companies and ourselves included, don't have a choice about. If you stop innovating, you exit the business cycle without a business. So, you are seeing lots of things cut, but not the R&D budgets. We are still seeing a relatively healthy market for our test equipment that's used in an R&D environment.

Q: With 3G about to be rolled out, how big a change do you see in the way wireless devices are being used?

3G is probably a year away. Even with the existing upgrades to the current system, you are going to see more and more digital content. You are going to see more people using text messaging. There really is going to be graphical access used on your cell phone. You really are going to be accessing the Internet -- maybe in a limited form because of the limited input-output device, but I can tell you from the standpoint of navigation, Yellow Pages and those sorts of things ... you are going to discover you always have a huge amount of information. You have a walking library if you can access the Internet over your cell phone.

Q: Where do you see Agilent fitting into this new world of telecommunications? Where do you want the company to be?

We want to play a role in software that controls those networks. We are going to play a role in the devices contained in them -- both the portable as well as fixed location equipment and we will continue to lead in the test equipment in both the development and manufacture of this. It sounds so arrogant, but we do play in all of those places and they are actually kind of hidden. You can go to the big name suppliers and you will find out we are one of the largest suppliers to many of the name people.

-- [e-mail]