Consumer Electronics Forum

In late March, Electronics Products conducted the Consumer Electronics Forum to find out what the latest trends and to discuss the issues engineers face today. While better battery life and low power continue to be issues, the industry still faces a variety of other challenges too.

Electronic Products : What trends in consumer electronics do you see today and what are driving these trends?

Ron Demcko (Applications Engineering Manager, AVX) : What we’re seeing is a desire for smaller systems which have more functionality and (in the case of optics) better resolution. Perhaps it’s a cell phone camera or just a normal digital camera.

Ron Demcko, AVX

But also a huge trend is lower leakage or better battery life performance of the device. So that would probably be the best summary of what we’re seeing better battery life and small size being the biggest direction we’re hearing.

Chris Chipman (Marketing Manager for Video Transmitter Products, Analog Devices) : And I would certainly concur with the statement that much of what is critical in the video out arena is small size and low power.

Chris Chipman, Analog Devices

And I would extend that low-power discussion to say it’s not only for active functioning power or dynamic power, but also in the case of standby power. So there’s minimal power management required. When you can just put a part in standby and have very low leakage, on the order of microwatts, in order to extend battery life.

Because, in the case of video, the duty cycle for when you’re actually using that part is fairly low. It’s only when you’re connected to a TV or some other display device so you want it to be extremely low standby power.

Andy Melder (Vice President of Business Development for Gigle Networks) : And I would say the trend that we see, again we’re looking at connectivity devices, is that consumer electronics platforms and devices in the homes today are being connected to the cloud.

I think we’re starting to see most of the TV OEMs advertising what they would call “Connected TVs”, which initially was simply adding an RJ-45 port to the back of the TV. Unfortunately the consumer doesn’t really have a good idea of what to do with it unless the router modem is very close to the TV, which is usually not the case.

The notion of being connected, while interesting, is starting to give way to more sophisticated means of connecting to the cloud which would include Wi-Fi, power line communications, coax using MoCA, possibly phone lines.

That trend seems to be propagating nicely across a large segment of the consumer electronics market, including TVs and Blu-Ray players. Blu-Ray players are connected with the aim of being able to retrieve content and services from the cloud, but also to be able to experience gaming activities, including social gaming to accommodate other groups being part of the experience.

Overall I think we’re going to see over the coming years more and more devices needing ways to access remote content as well as remote experiences through connections to the cloud.

Andy Melder, Gigle Networks

Electronic Products : What constitutes a connected device?

Andy Melder : Connected means some ability to connect to the Internet, or the cloud. By connecting to the Internet, I now have the ability to tap into additional services and content that I would only normally be able to tap into from a PC-type platform.

Chris Chipman : And I think that pairs well with beyond the TV itself. There are other home electronics like an audiovisual receiver or a set-top box or a DVD player, and maybe in the future evensome sort of telepresence device.

And a lot of that is being addressed within the small network for the home entertainment by HDMI, a new feature within HDMI 1.4, which is the HDMI Ethernet channel which it allows all those devices to communicate with each other and connect to the cloud. So there is at least the infrastructure being laid for having a high-bandwidth connection between all of your home entertainment electronics and then making it out to the Internet.

Doug Bailey (VP Marketing, Power Integrations) :

Doug Bailey, Power Integrations

We have a slightly different perspective perhaps than the guys who are application focused because our power supply technology reaches across multiple applications. I would echo the sentiments on standby power; however, we see it not just for cell phones and handhelds, but also for all other appliances. The drive to low standby power consumption is primarily being driven by energy-efficiency specifications, the EuP (energy-using products) initiative and the European Union. We see customers moving from 1-W to 1/2-W standby for most consumer appliances and entertainment products, and we’re actually seeing a demand for 100 mW standby from many of the bigger OEMs.

We’re also seeing massive increases in the light output efficiency of TVs as they move to LED backlighting, so TVs are really changing the amount of power they’re consuming in operational mode. The other perhaps less obvious trend we’re seeing is a significant move towards quality — and that’s a bit of a strange trend. Typically price is everything in the electronics business; however, as China’s internal market has matured, they’ve started to develop brand preferences. More of my daily conversations with customers have changed from being pricing-focused to being quality and reliability related. Manufacturers are trying to establish brand, and they’re looking for ways to ensure that they don’t sabotage their integrity by building a power system or any other system that’s going to fail in the field.

Ron Demcko : I can echo that. Even on a component basis we’re seeing that amount of emphasis being placed on individual components. It’s almost like the consumer markets now have the same requirements as automotive type grade markets. It’s an encouraging trend.

Electronic Products : What are the issues that designers face while consumer devices not only need to be connected to the Internet, but also need to be fully featured and connected to one another?

Andy Melder : I think we’ve got a great panel here because we have some really wide ranging views as to what’s critical and I think they’re all important.

From my perspective, I would say quality of service is probably one of the most important elements of delivering a service or any experience to these platforms. And again by quality of service what I mean is replicating the type of experience that you would otherwise receive from a carrier or service provider like an AT&T, Verizon, and others.

When you turn on your TV today you have either cable, satellite, or IPTV.You expect what’s known as a “5-9s experience” — 99.999% of the time that picture is there, it’s stable, and it doesn’t break up. The consumer has become very much conditioned to that type of an experience.

Now contrast that with getting on your laptop and bringing up a YouTube video. Number one, the video is not quite what you would expect in your living room. And number two, there is no quality of service inherent in the delivery of content coming from a Google server that’s delivering you a YouTube video. As a result, you might see some break up or some hesitation as you watch that video on your laptop.

There is an expectation that comes along with watching a YouTube video on a laptop that the consumer is conditioned to understand and willtherefore provide a little leeway. However, when you start delivering services that can be consumed in your living room, your den or your home theater, the conditioned response on the part of a consumer is that they want a “5-9’s experience,” much like what they get today from a facilities-based operator.

So when you’re trying to move content around a home network or to your entertainment platform through over-the-top means, then your expectation is starting to creep upwards to replicate what you otherwise would see if you’re watching one of your favorite programs by your service provider.

Gigle Networksis concerned about how that delivery of content makes each of those platforms behave in a way that really mimics and replicates the experience that you would otherwise get in your home theater or home entertainment area.

Chris Chipman : I certainly agree with the quality of service points. But looking at it from a hardware perspective and the devices that you’re going to be hooking together I think one of the things that has arisen in the past has been interoperability issues between devices from different OEMs or different suppliers. Oftentimes those can be very challenging.

One that comes to mind here is in relation to consumer electronics control where each OEM has been able to define a lot of their own commands and a lot of their own information in an attempt to get a customer to buy all of their home entertainment equipment from one vendor, which I think is probably not realistic.

I think there have been a lot of interoperability issues and probably there’s still a lot to be sorted out. So I certainly see that as an issue that’s going to be faced both from the perspective of integrators as well as from the perspective of the end customer or the consumer.

Ron Demcko : I agree with Andy fully and Chris, I would expand on one thing just a little bit. On the hardware design point of view, when we’re dealing with the designers one of the things that they’re talking about is a real need for hardened ports whether the ports happen to be RF or perhaps cabling, there is still a need for hardening.

And then another thing that we found is that there is a desire for compatible and non-interfering systems so there’s a big effort to have compatible power quality or high-quality power available to all devices as well as a good EMI response where boxes won’t either emit radiation or be abnormally susceptible to it in the environment.

Doug Bailey : I’m afraid I don’t really have a great deal to add when it comes to the interconnectiveness of consumer products. It’s not something that we bump into. I do think that the demand response from power companies may end up having an effect on communications, but on more of a hardware level than a media level.

Electronic Products : What is your primary consideration when developing a new product for consumer electronics?

Chris Chipman : One of the things that we are focusing on quite a bit is portable and handheld consumer electronics and in particular video output from those whether it be a handset or a portable media player, Netbook, and maybe in the future even portable gaming.

So, kind of back to what we were talking about with some of the trends earlier, you know, it’s just – it’s absolutely critical in terms of having very low active-power dissipation and even better, much, much better standby power dissipation. It’s just absolutely critical. That’s a huge item.

In this small space. I mean, clearly these things are becoming smaller and smaller, they’re already like little bricks today. The available area for the board for the electronics is becoming more and more constrained.

Ron Demcko : Yeah one of the things that we’re looking at is it has to fit in with similar corporate core beliefs and expertises, but also if we’re going to come up with a new product it has to be well beyond the “me too,” something that would actually yield a performance advantage and potentially a design advantage that would be very compelling.

So for instance there’s ways that you could reduce perhaps 50% or more of the decoupling capacitors on a board with some of our technologies and end up with even a better EMI or EMC response as well as better power quality on the board. So, you know, we really have to leapfrog with any new idea.

Doug Bailey : We’re seeing a big push for efficiency and no-load performance. I think somebody else mentioned size, and that’s actually another thing that we’re being asked for a lot — that is, to reduce the size of power supplies.

We all know electronics, in general, are pretty skinny. VGAs, LCD TVs, and so on are very thin; however, power supplies tend to have magnetic components and capacitors that are quite large. So we are putting a lot of effort into getting the power conversion frequencies up without damaging efficiency so that we can reduce the size of the magnetics and capacitors.

Electronic Products : Do technical standards that are out there today affect the design process? I’m sure in the power area it probably would be a challenge, correct?

Doug Bailey : Yeah absolutely. It’s driving the design of power supplies, and it’s also driving the need to change power supply designs. Volts and amps are the standard requirement in electronics equipment, so the only reason to redesign a power supply is that you need a different number of one parameter or another, or because you need to provide them more efficiently. Efficiency and no-load performance changes are driving an awful lot of design activity.

Andy Melder : Industry standards are clearly a major component in the building blocks of networking elements in the home. When you think of networking, most people immediately think about Ethernet ,Wi-Fi and USB, among others. They are all based on IEEE standards. —

In wire line home connectivity, other standards that have emerged such as MoCA, IEEE 1901 which is the universal power line standard now, and even to some degree HPNA, which is a more narrowly defined andnarrowly used technology.

In our case, IEEE 1901, which was recently ratified, is quite important because it determines and defines how IP traffic gets routed through the power grid in your home, and potentially even external to your home. Adhering to those standards is of paramount importance as we start putting that technology into a variety of platforms.

Again, it all comes down to interoperability. If you buy a product from Vendor A, another from Vendor B and they don’t talk to one another, that’s not very useful to the consumer. Wi-Fi has gained its share around the world because of its utility and ease of use. It has become successful because IEEE is active and because it is interoperable among all silicon vendors and suppliers of that technology.

Ron Demcko : The standards are affecting the way we design our components. For instance, RoHS has imparted on us to produce components that are material compliant and environmentally green. They’re also affecting the reliability requirements of the components, for instance AEC Q-200 is requiring a higher level of quality for automotive.

And then also from a use point of view, the designers that are going to be using our components are going to see a lot of requirements for transient voltage in EMC specs whether it’s IEC 61000 series or FCC requirements. The number of standards for the end use are just going to mushroom and probably very validly so.

Chris Chipman : And Christina in the video realm certainly we are impacted by standards. Some that come to mind would be CEA 861 and certainly the HDMI specification or HDCP, those sorts of things continue to evolve, either through the addition of additional resolutions or color space support for video or through new features like we discussed before in terms of supporting 3-D video or audio return channel which is something that’s used more in sound bar type applications or the HDMI Ethernet Channel we talked about earlier.

Electronic Products : Is there a communication between you and the customer and what do they say?

Andy Melder : In my caseour customers fall into a couple of different categories. We have service providers as customers. Again those are the telcos, the MSOs, the satellite providers, and the WiMAX operators..

We view them as customers one step removed from what I would say are purchasing customers, in the sense that operators don’t typically buy chips directly from silicon vendors. –Rather, they buy products from set top box manufacturers, residential gateway manufacturers, and others.

However, the stability of the network is of such high importance in the home to an operator ,a consumer, and a subscriber, that we spend quite a bit of time with the carriers to directly understand their requirements. Wemake sure that the RFPs and tenders that they put on the street include the technology we feel will be most valuable to them.

At the same time we also talk to the OEMs and ODMs that build the products that go into the home that the operators use to deliver services. Of course, there is the other customer category which would include the CE OEMs and the networking OEMs — companieslike Samsung,Viszio,Sharp, and Sony. – These are the big retail names that the consumer is familiar with, as well as those companies that make networking gear that goes into your home.Those include NETGEAR, Linksys by Ciscos, Belkin, D-Link, and others..

We have a pretty broad cross-section of customers that we talk to frequently. We are expecting feedback from those customers since they are the ones that are delivering products at retail or to the operators. The products need to be robust, stable, and deliver the experiences that the consumer or the subscriber is expecting.

It’s very important to be in constant communication with the customers and their customers’ customers.

Chris Chipman : Our customers span a number of marketing segments, you know, from the portable and imaging which we talked about earlier which are more sensitive to size and power, but also some of the other trends that we see have to do with the adoption of video components into automotive applications, so beyond home entertainment and pro video.

So I think we really look at it, number one, we do have to stay close to our customers and understand what’s driving their development and that would be their customers. So it really spans a pretty wide breadth just depending on what market segment we’re trying to address.

Certainly automotive is very concerned about quality and probably not as sensitive on price or power or even size for that matter. Home entertainment, again they’re more driven by becoming more power efficient, but also having full featured products that have a lot more capabilities than perhaps are required in portable or imaging.

Ron Demcko : Our customers, of course, are primarily designers, right, and their demands are going to vary by the type of design. But generally we could say that there is a huge request on simulation software and that’s just increasing daily. And also a lot more data, much more comprehensive data, much more in circuit data is a trend which they’re requiring. But probably the most encouraging one is a design collaboration on both ends.

For instance, AVX is allowed to comment on their design. In some cases we might even have an engineer stay at their factory for some portion of time. That’s – basically our designer for a week program – he might go on site as a engineer for the week and help them with their designs or comments on how we can make their design more efficient.

But also we’ll have them at our design center and our R&D center and they’ll actually give AVX end use design tips, talk about their biggest problem in building some sort of box, whatever their design is, and talk about their dream components. And we get those inputs and take them very seriously.

Chris Chipman : I guess one other thing that comes to mind that we see a lot more from customers now is the desire or the requirement to support software which is not traditionally what we have done as a semiconductor component supplier.

But what’s become more and more the case these days is to support the customer with driver code, driver source code, to ease their design tasks. So I think that probably falls under the ever-growing support requirements from customers.

Electronic Products : We touched base a little bit on power, low power, but in terms of green issues, what is your perspective as they relate to the consumer electronics and the design process?

Andy Melder : In our case, one of the standards bodies that we participate with very closely is the HomePlug Powerline Alliance. HomePlugis actually now being tightly coupled with the IEEE 1901 standard which is now the IEEE power line communications standard.

One of the elements of the roadmap for HomePlug is what’s known as the green PHY initiative – “green” obviously being synonymous with renewables and with energy savings. What it really amounts to is the development and design of a physical layer device that would sit on the power line as the medium of choice. However, it would be significantly lower in power consumedand dissipated.

It would also be designed more for command and control applications, those that require less throughput than multimedia applications,, which takes a lot of bandwidth.

But the green PHY is being put in place for applications involving the utilities. Utilities are becoming very interested in smart grid applications that will manage the power grid, and allow them to perform functions like automatic meter reading or demand/response loading.

These are applications which don’t require, for example, 200 megabits per second of throughput, – different from what you would need for good HD content distribution capabilities.

So it certainly fits in very well with all the green initiatives that we see elsewhere in the industry. .For example EnergyStar compliance, certainly fits in well with the notion of the utilities becoming “operators”, so to speak, of their own network.

When you compare the power grid as a network to an IP-based network that a facilities-based service provider uses to deliver services to your home, currently they are light-years apart in terms of serviceability, self awareness, self healing, manageability, and so on.

The utilities are coming up the curve of sophistication to allow themselves to really monitor and track what’s happening on the power grid in real time. So a green PHY initiative such as a HomePlug in a 1901 standards body, fits in very well with all of that.

Doug Bailey : Yeah so it’s obviously our business. That’s what we spend all of our time worrying about is the efficiency of the next generation product and the standby power. So it’s the topic that we operate our company by and so it’s difficult to answer in such general terms. I mean, I can be far more specific to a far more specific question but, you know, to the question you’ve got is yes, we see it everywhere and it’s what we do.

Ron Demcko : What we’re seeing, you know, certainly the trend everybody else is experiencing, right, with the green-power generation.

It’s interesting though because some of the technologies that we have traditionally had were more concentrated on the power generation for very large segment devices and now one of the big trends that we’ve identified and are working with certainly many other companies are energy harvesting. These are ways to take power from sources whether they be solar or thermal or mechanical. There is much that we could do with some of our traditional technologies to go after generation on a much smaller scale.

But then in terms of the traditional components that are offered as was mentioned by one of the other panel members, the components have to be much more efficient particularly at frequencies. For instance, power supply people are going up in frequency.

So much of that trend demands us to better characterize our components across frequency as well as make them more efficient whether they’re lower in ESR, lower in inductance, or even lower in leakage. Of course, leakage wouldn’t necessarily be a frequency effect. But the whole point is, we have to make traditional products more efficient to address the high-frequency use. ■