Consumer Electronics Forum

Small, fast, green, powerful

CONVENED AND MODERATED BY RALPH RAIOLA

Designing for the consumer space—things like an Ipod or Wii game system—sounds like tons of fun, but there are many pressures weighing heavily on EEs as well as component suppliers, such as the notion of green, dealing with high speeds, convergence and connectivity, and others. We recently gathered a group of industry professionals to discuss how the industry is giving the consumer everything it wants.

Selling green

Electronic Products : Manufacturers of consumer electronic devices are really using the notion of green as a selling point. What do they actually mean by and, how does this affect designers and thecomponents they’re choosing?

Bruce DeVisser (Product Marketing Mgr., Touch Input Devices, Fujitsu Components America) : In my experience there are at least two sides to that. One is from engineering’s perspective.

It usually means all the components are RoHS-compatible, and further, that you’re using green processes to manufacture you’re products.

That’s basically what it is. If you look at most of the major corporations’ green initiative publications, they stress no harm to the environment.

And that’s because to the consumer, my belief is, [green] mostly means recyclable: products made with minimal impact, or no impact, to the environment. I think there’s a huge concentration of effort in China now to have an even higher standard for manufacturing of components and electronic equipment.

But with the recent developments of things like this melamine contamination and so on, people are starting to cast a jaundiced eye, if you will, toward China on some of the products. Since so much of our manufacturing and CM base is in China now, I’m wondering if there won’t be some sort of backlash from consumer watchdogs on the electronics side, which no one pays any attention to.

Electronic Products : Yes, especially when you see these striking images of piles and piles of discarded cell phones and old computer mice that are just basically next to somebody’s home.

Bruce DeVisser : The average consumer doesn’t get it on that part of it. We do. We’re technical people.

Scott Sommers (Group Mgr. for new product development, Molex) : One of the other things is the cost to the manufacturer for something like the halogen-free initiative or ROHS as was indicated before. We make connectors and for us it’s a huge cost impact to go to some of these alternative materials and new materials. And they may not run in the same molds as we’ve already used.

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Tom Donofrio (Marketing Mgr., Central Semiconductor) : I think we all see it. As suppliers to OEMs, we do not have the ability to pass along these new costs. So, for the most part, for the green product—the RoHS or the halogen-free products—we’re charging the same price as the leaded product.

Pierre Mars (VP of applications engineering, CAP-XX) : The other thing that we see is in applications where they’ve been trying to use a renewable energy source. There are companies in China, for example, that have solar panels across the top of a mobile phone.

So we’re supplying supercapacitors because we can be charged with low average power and these supercaps provide the big power for a GPS in transmission, for example, we’ve seen some applications coming along where people are looking to use the supercap for energy-harvesting applications. So then they can promote greenness in that way: they have renewable energy.

Electronic Products : What about the notion of green as it relates to power consumption. Is the consumer expecting lower power consumption when they hear green?

Scott Sommers : When you see something like this, we see a market coming. I think the stat is approximately 22% to 30% of all the electrical energy used in the United States is for lighting, and if we were to convert 50% of that to LED lighting, we’d save 6% to 7% on the country’s total usage of electrical energy—something like $17 billion.

So we look at that as a market and we’re developing some new sockets for LED applications. Our products are small and can give better cooling at a reasonable price.

Jimmy Chou (Senior Product Marketing Mgr., USB Products, PLX Technology ) : I think that power consumption is definitely one of the top concerns of some of our customers, especially the standby power of the components. A lot of our customers that make portable-devices use batteries, so when you are not connecting to the PC—not doing anything with our USB products—the chip will consume as little power as possible. USB is still the lowest-power per megabyte of transfer between the peripheral and the PC.

Pierre Mars : From a consumer’s perspective, as somebody said earlier, we’re technical people and we get it. The end consumer doesn’t know. So a lot of the green stuff that people talked about with RoHS, et cetera, they’re all directly European Commission directives. They’re driving us there. We’re being shepherded down there on the consumer’s behalf.

Power consumption is always important to engineers and that really translates into things like standby time, for example, in the phone for a consumer. That’s stuff that consumers get in terms of efficiency: If you say, “This is more efficient than that.”

You know, take my daughter: the new consumer. She just wants stuff that comes in pink.

And then also it’s something that is either a tangible benefit or—as I said the Chinese company that had the solar panel—it’s something that’s visible to the consumer and they can say, “Right. I need that. With that charger I can leave it on my desk in sunlight or under fluorescent light and I’m going to get longer run-time.” So, it’s not always directly driven on the consumer side.

Scott Sommers : IDC estimated that in the new data center, 50% of the power used is to power the system. The other 50% is used to cool the system.

So, again, it’s a market for us to develop connectors that have better airflow and simplified cabling. But, the point is that half of the power is used to cool the system.

Electronic Products : Is the halogen-free issue cropping up now and affecting the industry?

Scott Sommers : Yes, we are directly affected by that. And anybody who has cabling also is directly affected.

Electronic Products : Is it in the PVC jacket?

Scott Sommers : Correct. That’s the primary area. But connectors also have halogen and we have to certify to many of our customers that our product is halogen free.

Electronic Products : Is that something that your customers are requiring because they’re promoting it to their end customers?

Scott Sommers : Absolutely they are. Our customers are the top consumer companies in the world so what they tell customers is a direct impact on us to make sure that that product is halogen free. And then, like I said, we have to certify that they are.

Pierre Mars : Yes, we’re seeing the same requirement as well.

Buying power

Electronic Products : Where will the power be coming from in the future? Will ultracapacitors go far enough to be able to replace batteries once and for all? Or some semiconductor-based device?

Bruce DeVisser : I’ve looked at the power situation a lot, kind of from the sidelines and helping customers with product design: a lot of it in the mobile space. Because of that I’m also involved somewhat in the appliance market, so you’re looking at line-powered devices, and batteries seem to be the most important piece of the pie right now, simply due to the proliferation of mobile devices. The technology continues to improve but lithium is a pretty good technology overall.

Ten years ago power management was pretty basic. We’d switch buses off and on and that would be about as good as you could do. Today, in a device like a notebook PC we can modulate individual functional blocks to the level they need and we accommodate power specs by design using active elements like supercaps versus just having an overall power budget that can absorb the maximum power requirement. Kind of the old fashioned line-power way.

But we’re seeing even line-powered devices concentrating a lot on maximizing efficiency by using different types of motors: continuing to reinvent the ac motor, if you will, for the dishwasher. If you can make it more efficient, that’s a benefit—in the consumer space, or in the appliance segment of the consumer space.

In the US for example, you have the Energy Star program. That’s been around for a long time. And that keeps getting promoted. We still get benefits, here in California anyhow. If we go buy a new refrigerator and it’s Energy Star compliant, we may get a rebate from the power company.

But with the newest power management ICs and integrated power-management functions being incorporated into MPUs, I think the efficiency continues to improve. We used to design just to make the battery in a portable device last long enough to be barely acceptible to the consumer. And now we want all-day usage from one charge on something like a notebook, which has a big, big power sink there.

And, the other thing that was mentioned earlier is the off-state of a device, even line powered. I think something like 11% of the power budget in California could be done away with if all of the devices that had the power button in the “off” position actually did not consume power.

Tom Donofrio : Absolutely. The off-state issue is something we deal with all the time. What engineers need from us are components that, when they’re in the off state, minimize the leakage situation in a a portable device or, even in a line-running device.

I recently saw a news report noting how much you would save on your home energy bill if you went through your house and physically unplugged all these electronic devices. But the consumer doesn’t know that the device is sitting there “off” and it’s actually utilizing energy, or leaking energy, in one respect.

The on-state condition is the other thing we’re looking at—trying to make devices that are more energy efficient. If it’s a line-level device, something like the Energy Star rebates directly relate to the consumer. They see that as a savings to them.

When it has to do with portable devices, they’re only looking at the efficiency, like, “How much can I get out of that battery before I have to recharge it?” They don’t even think of the recharging aspect, just, “How long can I utilize this device before I need to recharge?”

Electronic Products : Until they have to plug it in at their house.

Tom Donofrio : And then they’re not thinking about how much energy it uses.

Electronic Products : How far can we go in terms of off-state efficiency improvements? It seems on-state is probably where there’s more improvement to be made.

Tom Donofrio : We’ve seen that in the switch from some of the more standard discrete devices to the small-signal MOSFET devices, where you’re going to have more energy efficiency. Right now, it’s a little bit more expensive for the designer and that’s certainly an issue. But I think as those types of devices develop and become more cost effective you’ll see additional efficiency.

Pierre Mars : In Australia for example, down here in Sydney, they’ve introduced what they call Smart Metering for electricity. So my tariff now changes. Instead of having the old simple off-peak and ordinary electricity rates, they now have “time of day” free rates depending on time of day.

So, you can set your dishwasher or washing machine with a timer to run in the middle of the night. So you’re going to run cheaper tariff—load leveling.

Because one of the big things from the government’s perspective is not just the total energy but also the big power loads. So they’re looking at trying to spread the load and we’re getting that time-of-day metering.

I’ve seen some some RFQs where people have probably misunderstood what a supercap will do and looking for using a supercap to power the off state. And, with the TVs and DVDs as people have mentioned, one of the things I see happening, is that there could be a bit of a con there.

I can see a trend where people will put a little lithium ion battery or whatever in the unit, so that when it’s off it’s completely off and so they can then make the claim, “We draw no parasitic power when we’re off,” or, “There’s off state power,” but in fact the overall energy consumption may be greater than where they currently are today because when the unit is on they’re recharging that battery.

And using a battery to not draw any line power in the “off” state so they can make the claim, but the energy they draw on when they’re on, to charge that battery, is actually when we look at it overall, they’re actually taking more energy over the whole year than they would in the current state. And that’s something that I can see happening because people won’t fully understand what it is.

Because we’ve seen requirements like that where people have already started to refer to either supercaps or they’re looking for batteries and/or supercaps to hold the power up, to not draw any line power in the offstate. To do the overall energy budget they’re actually worse off but they can still make the claim that, “We don’t draw any line power when we’re off.”

In the green space, the biggest applications we’ve seen have actually been in the business market rather than the consumer markets where people have been taking to energy harvesting. And they’re initially in the business area but eventually I suppose it will leak across into consumers.

Electronic Products : How about the power connector?

Scott Sommers : Our customers are saying their customers—the consumers—want to carry around their devices longer without having to recharge them. They’ve asked us to look at some alternatives for next-generation batteries, which include fuel cells. A lot of our mobile customers are looking at, possibly in automotive, some fuel cells going forward, or some next-generation device.

So for us, we’re a connector manufacturer and it’s just about metal and making sure it has everything working together properly. But this whole discussion opens up more markets. Solar power, wind turbines: where one door closes another one opens.

The need for speed

Electronic Products : We want our data and we want it now. how this whole notion of getting stuff – getting my stuff now and intact with the highest quality possible is affecting us as an electronics industry?

Jimmy Chou : USB started with USB 1.1 and it was only like 12 Mbits/s. And when we started USB 2.0, it advanced to 480 Mbits/s, and we thought, “Wow, that was fast. That was 40x faster.”

And now we’re moving actually to USB 3.0 and that turns out to be 10x more than the USB 2. We’re moving to 5 Gbits/s. But now the question is, “How fast is fast enough?”

Do we really need USB 3.0? Five Gbits/s seems like a lot, right? One example of the USB is the user transfer of DVD or high-def video. To transfer an 25-Gbyte HD video from the computer to medial players with USB 1.1 it takes more than nine hours, and with USB 2.0 maybe about 15 minutes.

With the USB 3.0, I think they can roughly get it within a minute. So that shows you how fast actually it can go.

But of course there has to be a compromise in different places. There are storage speeds, there are different buses in the system. So it’s not just one segment of the system—USB 3.0 can handle 5 Gbits/s but your hardware can only allow maybe 20 or 25 megabytes for those 1.8-in. hard drives.

Speed is definitely the key, and that’s how the USB 2.0 got so successful because the speed covered so much out there—camcorders, hard drives, flash keys. But now I think the concern in the future is will USB 3.0 be cost effective? Will we actually need 5 Gbits/s on all these USB devices? I don’t think people need a mouse at 5 Gbits/s.

Electronic Products : So is it actually marketing-driven?

Jimmy Chou : Once these things start showing up in the consumer PC, they definitely will be used as a marketing tool and become [part of] a checklist for the PC. And even though the consumer has no idea what’s different between USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 or even USB 1.1, they’ll think, “Okay, this computer with USB 3.0 is better, right?”

But I think to the manufacturers, cost is still number one…and I think to the consumers backward-compatibility is the key for all those technologies. Once you put in USB 3.0 will it work with the USB 2.0 device? That’s very crucial for them because once you put a USB 3.0 in there and it doesn’t work with all the legacy USB 2.0, then it will be obsolete in the consumer market really soon.

Scott Sommers : We see this all the time. USB is one point in the race: one group.

There’s the computer guys which are computer oriented, as Jimmy just said, and they came out with DisplayPort, which is their IO for video. And then there’s also the HDMI camp, which is consumer. So here you have three different groups all vying for kind of the same space eventually.

And that begs the question, as you said, about use. “Do I need my mobile telephone that I have in my hand to play an HD movie at my home when I want it?” I mean, yes, you can make a use case for it. But, how do I get those signals? Do I use USB or do I use an HDMI or do I use a DisplayPort?

So, there is a lot of marketing to it but it really comes down to the use cases and what a consumer wants to do with that device and what they can afford to do. And then you throw in some of these other ones like (IEEE 1394) which is FireWire.

Electronic Products : And that’s the one you don’t even hear talked about in the same breath anymore with some of the other ones.

Scott Sommers : And that one was the fastest. So it really has been a marketing effort. USB 3.0 is getting out to where 1394 was years ago. Just now.

Jimmy Chou : Oh really? I thought the IEEE 1394 only went to 800 Mbits/s?

Scott Sommers : Right. Well it’s got 8B/10B encoding, so you do the math. But my point is that there hasn’t been a need for high-definition movies to be played from a consumer mobile device to your house yet. Will that be needed next year or do I have to walk into a conference room and play a PowerPoint movie somehow with a overhead projector?

Those are all scenarios that all these groups are trying to vie for and position themselves in. And it has to do with convergence.

Is a computer going to be sitting in the middle of your living room one day? No, if you ask the consumer guys, but yes if you ask the computer guys. So that’s one of the convergence issues. Will all these standards merge one day?

Tom Donofrio : It’s interesting, because I deal a lot with our school system, and, there’s your future consumers. If any of you have kids and you watch them at home sitting on a computer doing their homework while watching TV, basically the data is showing their brain synapses are actually working faster—50% higher than ours do.

I think if we can deliver the technology to them, they will use it. They use it now. And if we look beyond them at the younger kids who are coming up, they’ll find those applications and they’ll use them.

Electronic Products : How are Central’s products affected by high speed?

Tom Donofrio : On the protection side with—TVSs and such—that really hasn’t changed all that much. On the other side, with the switching speed of our diodes and transistors, we are always constantly trying to improve on those things.

Bruce DeVisser : Jimmy hit on a point. It’s not about mouse speed and all that. For human interface, speed only really becomes important if you’re talking about something like a projecting capacitive touch panel.

You have a large X-Y matrix to decode and you want to provide zero-latency feedback to the user, which is always desirable. With today’s small touch panels and that type of technology, the end user has more than enough capability to process the data.

In terms of the overall picture, I think we’re still bandwidth limited. One of the things you see people trying to do is replace HDMI cables with wireless because of the bandwidth issues.

There are some products that are attempting to do that but the technology’s run into a few problems too. I think the market definitions of what’s needed in the consumer space really needs to drive what we develop.

USB was a perfect example. I happened to be involved in USB 1.0. At the time, Apple had FireWire. And, because Apple is Apple and everybody else is against them, or less than cooperative, they ended up with FireWire and USB being standalone specs, whereas way back when they could have been integrated.

But at that point the other thing working against us was FireWire was it was a little bit too fast for desktop. It’s kind of strange how it’s evolved.

With transferring data, another aspect I see is the concentration on mobile devices and the attempt to address the youth market: they want everything mobile and they want to be able to download and see their YouTubes now. They don’t want to wait five minutes for it to download.

Wired bandwidth is still a problem because what people use as a basis for calculation when they model these things is the specified bandwidth. That’s not the actual bandwidth, which we all know.

There are a lot of choke points in the system, and in wireless the choke point is the wireless emitter: wherever it is, whether it’s a Wi-Fi or a WLAN, or whatever. I think the current economic condition is going to delay infrastructure rollouts and that may have some effect.

Scott Sommers : We see that with our customers too. We are not designing the R System anymore in a tower by ourselves. It’s all about chip-to-chip channel management where everybody’s involved, making sure everything from via launch on the board to channel management to footprints are all thought about.

We’ve been around 70 years. If you looked at us maybe 10 years ago we had maybe 2% EEs in our staff. Now, because of all the speed requirements and the need for speed, 25% to 30% of our engineers are EEs now.

For a connector company you wouldn’t think that, but with our backplanes our customer’s are looking at 10 or 25 Gbits/s.

Pierre Mars : The only way we see it is when people are trying to get more power in the wireless space or more peak power. But even that is now no longer relevant because at one point that peak power was in GPRS but now they’re all moving to UMTS (which is constant power) to try to get extra bandwidth in wireless that for people who want to get their movies or their YouTube or whatever, impatiently.

Bridging man to machine

Electronic Products : The human-machine interface (HMI) may be the most important part of the consumer device, but it must be simple, intuitive, and interesting for the user.

Bruce DeVisser : I see [the industry] as pretty fractured. And it depends on what segment you’re talking about.

The simplest application—to me, anyhow—is appliances. We’re getting to the point of having interactive interfaces on appliances. And the appliance guys have got human interface down to an exact science: most of them, not all of them—I have an oven at home I’d like to talk to you about.

Electronic Products : But it’s just an electromechanical switch typically, right?

Bruce DeVisser : Well, it doesn’t matter. The interactive interface people think, “Oh, we can change anything anytime we want so it’s not that big of a deal.” But, from the appliance perspective they know how to simplify things, present the fewest choices in a very logical order.

To me, the opposite side of the coin are some of these cell phones. They’re impossible to navigate.

Uunless you’re a kid, and all you have to do is look at it so you’re very motivated to know how to quickly change between camera, video, and “tweeting on Twitter,” or whatever. The devices in that space that seem to shine pretty much are the latest smart phones: things like the iPod.

The interface, to me, is not the greatest because the human interaction is not always predictable. But, incorporating the speed changes of things running up and down the screen or scrolling and providing a logical sequence of events keeps it very simple.

And I think that’s where a lot of people fall down. I’ve dealt with a lot of issues on interactive human interfaces where people complain, “Well, nobody’s using this.” And it’s like, “Did you design it with the thought in mind that the person walking up to this device or that you’re handing this device to is not trained in how to use this?”

You know, what does the word “intuitive” mean to you? That’s basic, you know? But that’s what we deal with a lot.

And the other area that I deal with a lot has to do with young engineers with no mentors. They get tasked with designing an interface and they have no experience so they need a lot of hand-holding and all they have is some marketing guy yelling at them to make this thing and get it out the door.

There’s a lack of education in HMI, except in very specialized areas. I think the graphics area has really, in terms of academia, kind of shifted the focus away from HMI. There aren’t a lot of schools that really teach courses in HMI.

Electronic Products : Do you think that electrical-mechanical will cease to be one day? Or will these technologies continue to coexist?

Bruce DeVisser : I don’t think electro-mechanical will ever go away. There are just simply some physical electromechanical requirements that preclude you from going any other way, at least with today’s technology.

I see a lot more traditionally electromechanical applications converting to interactive because the cost of the interactive interface has come down so much. And, when you look at the cost of tooling today, you may have the choice of changing the tooling on your front panel to accommodate relocating switches and maybe extending your product line from Version A to Version B.

If you have an interactive interface, you go talk to the software engineer, he spends a couple days rewriting some code, and you’ve got a new interface. So that’s the big difference.

And ruggedness is constantly improving. We have systems on mine-boring machines—just these incredible things you would never think that someone would put an interactive interface on, they’ve now become standard. In fact that system is in Australia.

Pierre Mars : From our perspective in the supercap space, the only direct involvement we have had with human-machine interface is a couple of requirements for supercaps being asked to boost peak power for a HAPTIC interface. That’s really what we’ve seen, and in a couple of places people have asked for small, thin supercaps for a mobile phone in one area with one customer who was just doing a HAPTIC interface to go with the touch screen so that the user could feel confident that they actually pressed the key that they thought they’d pressed.

Bruce DeVisser : Actually, that’s a good point because if you have that limited of a power budget and you want to use a HAPTIC device that has the peak power profile that exceeds your maximum power budget, a supercap enables you to now do something with an HMI you couldn’t before. So that’s where technology’s helping out a lot and we even have solid-state actuators now and we’ve gone from a rotating off-balance mass to a solid state device that consumes less power and has much greater functionality.

Tom Donofrio : When you look at the traditional phone there are buttons, and you have to scroll up and scroll over, and find all this different functionality. On the display phones, like an iPhone or a BlackBerry, you have things that come up and it’s now done with software. So the software interfaces we have on a regular desktop, are now in your hand and that really improves that interface.

Overall, designers do need to be looking at how the users will use the device, and what are the expectations of the interface and how it can be simplified if possible.

Electronic Products : Isn’t that just sound design. Form follows function, right?

Tom Donofrio : Right. The traditional way might have been to do a focus group to see how the consumer actually uses [a product]. But are we now running so far ahead and looking for technology improvement that we’re not spending the time to actually see how is this going to be utilized?

We talk about things like the mouse or a keyboard, and much of that functionality is going to be replaced by a voice-activated system. You will walk up to a computer and talk to it and not necessarily have to interface through a keyboard.

But, we do see it in certain areas—certainly in the consumer area—where we have that interface. Application-wise, some of these iPhone applications that are out now are impressive.

There’s one that listens to a song on the radio and then comes back and tells you what it is in a matter of three seconds. It’s a great application.

I love it because I might hear a song and say, “Hey, what is this song?” How could you possibly find that out? Now you click a button on your iPhone and it comes back and tells you who the artist is. Then you click another button and you can download the song.

Scott Sommers : On the iPhone, talking about the interface, you can download an app that makes it turn into a harmonica. And you actually put your lips on the side of it and it’ll blow notes like a harmonica. And they have one, I think, for a kazoo also.

Electronic Products : That’s really HMI at its best, isn’t it?

Scott Sommers : Yes, absolutely. The other thing I want to say for Molex, we just introduced this capacitive switch technology. We teamed up with Cypress Semiconductor.

It’s a single capacitive assembly that replaces dozens of mechanical switches, and it’s a touch-sensitive interface so you can have it sensitive through gloves, it can function when it’s wet, or on a curved surface so we can put backlighting on it.

Jimmy Chou : For the human interface, the best example over the last couple years are the Wii game console, iPhone, and Tivo. You can see they pretty much set the standard for human interface. There’s really not much else.

And, in terms of the human interface, there are two important aspects—one is from the software side and one is from the hardware side. USB is usually categorized by the interconnect but it’s so crucial as far as an interface what USB has contributed.

The number one thing is plug-and-play. When a user plugs a USB cable into PC or camera, they know where to connect it. Their first instinct is they see that receptacle on the PC; they plug in one end and plug in the other end to the camera.

And that’s so intuitive that nobody really thinks about it. But that’s so important for a human interface on the plug-and-play format.

And another successful example on the USB side is the USB storage. USB flash drives have become so popular and it’s simply replaced all the removable media—floppy and all the other stuff in the past—so that everybody knows how to use flash key. They plug it in, they know how to drag and drop the files from the flash key to the computer, right, and back and forth.

But behind that plug-and-play on this flash key, there’s actually a lot of work that’s being done in there—not just the hardware connection, but the software driver built into all the OSs—in Windows, Mac, Linux, and embedded systems; they’ve all got this software to support this communication between flash media, and the system.

So, of course, there’ll be more connectivities needed and one example is when you think about connecting computers together. Today, that’s mostly done by networking with Wi-Fi or Ethernet cables. But there’s no way that the consumer can understand how this works, right? So we have to try to solve that problem by introducing a USB connection between computers.

It is known as the USB Duet [products]—I don’t know if you guys have heard about it. It’s a simple USB connection between computers using the standard cable. You probably don’t see that in today’s computers, but there have been more and more coming out in the UMPC, MID, and netbook PCs in the future.

And what is actually more critical in this connectivity is the software behind this, and how you actually make this configuration dummy-proof so you can plug in and it will just work.

Tom Donofrio : But what about the wireless part of that? Take a look at backup technologies today.

I can come home, sit down with my notebook, open it up, and basically it’s automatically doing a backup to a wireless drive.

Jimmy Chou : Yes. That’s certainly really nice. I think that’s what wireless USB is trying to address: remove that cable and maintain the speed.

So I think that with wireless technology, there are several things still not there yet. One is how you transfer data securely, and how you associate your device with your PC and also—the most important thing—is how do you set it up.

There are a lot of people trying to do, for example, a universal plug-and-play and there’s just no easy way to do this. Most of the people that are running a Wi-Fi router at home don’t even know how to set up the password on the router.

Electronic Products : Maybe they shouldn’t have to.

Tom Donofrio : We have cottage industries out there now that can come to your house and set up your home network, and for many people that’s a requirement. But, if the industry does its job and all the manufacturers do as they should, in the future, that industry goes away and you do have plug and play.

I’ve set up quite a few of those and with some it goes through with no problems. With others, you’re on tech support trying to figure out how to make your connectivity and do all your configuration.

Scott Sommers : It goes back to the convergence between the computer and the consumer, and that’s where a lot of the problems have come in the past, [and it’s something] we [hope to] figure out—how to plug your computer into a TV or a display that is not sitting at your desk. Certainly some companies have taken a run at it but as an industry, we’re obviously not there yet.

The other interesting thing which I saw at the Intel Developer’s Forum was wireless power. They had a display on wireless power and that would be an interesting thing. I don’t know if I want to stand by one of those kiosks but that’d be another one.

We’re all connected

Electronic Products : One day, you may want to connect your microwave oven to your TV. What is the consumer’s expectation for everything to be connected?

Scott Sommers : As a connector manufacturer, where we see the connected world for the consumer is in the standards organization, so we try to support standards that the consumers want and, as I said, we see that VESA—the Video Electronics Standards Association—with DisplayPort they want to have something that goes very fast and can display high-definition content and is ubiquitous, eventually.

We also support advances in USB, as Jimmy talked about. That absolutely is everywhere you want. And then there’s some inside the box, too, that make the magic happen like Serial ATA, and Serial Attached SCSI, and Fiber Channel.

But then all of a sudden you look and you say, “Scott, you just talked about five, six standards right there.” You know there’s not one overlaying standard for consumers. Then I throw in HDMI and all of a sudden you’ve got an eight-connector universal jack.

Electronic Products : And it’s really kind of unfair at that point to the consumer. So, when does Molex—or any connector company begin to support a particular standard?

Scott Sommers : We obviously work very early on into the process so we work with our customers through our leading technology providers for the consumer as well as the computer industry a year or two ahead of when the standard actually gets released.

Molex is a big antenna maker so there’s a ton of different antenna technologies that are out there. And they have to work right next to the metal connector too, by the way, so we try and place our bets where our customers can help us and tell us where they want to place their bets, because we can come out with the next best connector in the world but if our customers don’t have an interest in it or if it doesn’t fit their needs we won’t take a deep dive into that.

But the chipset guys—the Intels of the world, the Microsofts of the world, the software guys—they all have to be behind it, and with a lot of these standards now, you’re seeing a broadly deployed standard—from chip to chip, software integrators and everybody in between—they are all on that standards committee call each week talking about these issues to try and make it work.

Jimmy Chou : The one thing that comes to my mind when we talk about this is why do we want to connect all these devices together? I think there are two main categories. One is the transfer of data. Media, the movies, music. The other is just to control all the devices.

So there’s definitely a lot of the different technologies out there but I believe that in the consumer world that USB and HDMI probably are the two that the consumers are aware of. They see more and more USB ports on their TVs, on the DVD players, and pretty much on all camcorders. And I think they do have this idea of HDMI transferring the hi-def video and the audio between devices.

But in terms of connecting from a microwave to a TV, or connecting a refrigerator to Wi-Fi or a router, shouldn’t that be thought of as a crazy idea? And when I first saw the Samsung refrigerator at Fry’s and it has this nice 10-inch LCD built in with a Wi-Fi connection, I asked, “Why?”

So I think there’s a certain limit. I don’t think that everything needs to be connected. And with the consumer, there’s a need and a want you can identify. And, if it’s only a want by the rich people and/or the gadget guys, right then that’s definitely not the one that the industry should pay the attention to, right?

Pierre Mars : Anecdotally rather than from a CAP-XX perspective, just taking my wife as a perfect example: what she hates is the fact that there are four remotes on the coffee table for the set top box, the TV, the DVD player, and the home stereo amplifier. And she cannot figure it out. If she ever wants to record something or whatever, I get called. She’s not alone in the consumer space.

Bruce DeVisser : Having worked with a few clients in this area, I think it’s been more of a marketing push, and I haven’t seen a great deal of success in actually implementing this except in the very few cases of ultra-high-end homes. Certainly the connected world exists very much in industry, especially if you look at things like processing-plant control—even for a marketing manager, having a dashboard on your PC to tell you what’s going on with orders and so on.

But, at home it’s nice to think about getting a cell phone message when something’s wrong at your house. But that’s pretty simple technology: that’s existed for quite a while. But, even this concept of putting an interactive interface on a refrigerator to allow you to order groceries or make a checklist that’s turned out to be a lead balloon.

Electronic Products : Where you see this on the consumer level is more in the car, right?

Scott Sommers : The vehicles with the GPS systems, where you can look for what you’re looking for and then all of a sudden have it dial a phone in your car via Bluetooth—that’s an integrated technology that’s pretty cool. You can keep your hands on the wheel and talk to your GPS, find what you need to. But really, you could also do it manually with something like OnStar.

Identifying the trends

Electronic Products : Identify what you believe to be the most important trend in consumer electronics.

Scott Sommers : For the most important trend, it’s kind of funny. We say that all the time in Molex, and every year it’s basically the same thing:smaller, faster, cheaper.

For connector manufacturers, everything’s getting smaller. There’s constantly shrinking form factors and with that comes the things we’ve talked about such as thermal management, power, the ability to handle higher speed.

And in our IO technology, we talk about these IOs now on a 0.4-mm pitch. We have FPC connectors that five years ago were 1 mm and everybody was marveling at how small they were. We have them now at 0.25-mm pitch.

Pierre Mars : Obviously, people want big power applications in smaller packages for their cameras and their wireless transmissions. And that’s why they’re using us.

Seven or eight years ago we started to make the small, thin supercaps because it was going to go into the consumer space where people wanted that sleek form factor but they wanted it with peak-power capabilities that are not otherwise readily available. And that’s been what we’ve seen: people are wanting better audio, better flash, better pictures, better transmissions.

All the issues of power management and other things that people are trying to do to get that peak power in a small, thin form factor is really what’s driven our business.

Jimmy Chou : One trend in the consumer market is thinking like a human thinks. It will be human-centered because the consumer is just a regular human being.

And I think speed certainly is one thing I can see is going to be – faster and faster. It’s never been fast enough. Because life is too short to wait, right?

And another thing is really versatility and the backward-compatibility because the technology is trying to advance so fast. In computers, ever year you see the speed double or quadruple. And in cameras I see the megapixels double every year. And all this media keeps changing.

But, when you buy a product you want it to last 10 years even though you know that next week they’re going to change it. You want it really to last a long time.

And when you, for example, buy a printer, five years from now will you be able to connect to the computer? That’s a problem. And the people will want to be able to see that their investment will guarantee a longer return. So that backward-compatibility is also very crucial for this trend.

Bruce DeVisser : The most important trend I’ve seen in the recent years has been the shift in product design, where industrial design of a product starts and now today drives the overall product design and the user interface. Before, the industrial design was first an afterthought and then it became part of the design team and now we see industrial design drives the design team to find technologies to meet the performance that the industrial design guys envision.

All these fancy smart phones with flat-surface touch panels and continuous surface, no breaks—that drove a lot of the changes in technology and in component selection. It caused new technologies to be developed for manufacturing. So that’s been the most important trend from the manufacturing perspective, or design perspective. ■