Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
There are few markets as hot, exciting and challenging as machine-to-machine these days. Analyst forecasts are an obvious way to identify a hot market, but another is the number of vendors entering the market. For automotive industry, telematics, fleet owners, utility companies, security providers, healthcare services and other M2M users, as well as M2M systems integrators, one challenge is figuring out which vendors have innovative technology that can make them stand out in a crowded marketplace. In the case of M2M, innovation centers on antennas since the antenna is critical to maintaining reliable, high-performance wireless connectivity.
There are several reasons why it’s challenging to design antennas that can meet M2M’s demanding requirements:
–Limited space: M2M modules frequently are inside equipment that appears to have ample room for antennas, such as vending machines, water meters or medical devices. But appearances can be deceiving because M2M modules are often as space constrained as smartphones and tablets. In the cell phone market, years of experience determined the best antenna placement. Within the exotic M2M space, the antenna is the last part thought about and is often seen as just another mechanical component. For example, in the case of a water meter, while it is much larger than a cell phone, there is still a very small amount of real estate available for the antenna, and not necessarily in the optimum location, with many interfering parts around it. Limited space makes it difficult to find room for the larger antenna volumes required for lower frequencies such as 400 MHz, 700 MHz and 900 MHz.
–RF-hostile environments: M2M modules can be installed in unusual environments, which impede their ability to connect. For example, utility meters often are installed in underground vaults and vending machines can be deep inside buildings. In many cases, the module is mounted inside the device, whose RF unfriendly metal housing further de-tunes the antenna.
–Frequency shifts, head, hand or other de-tuning effects: The physical environment around an M2M module often changes. Sometimes it’s sudden, such as when a home health nurse holds a patient monitor in a way that de-tunes the antenna. Other times, it is a foreseeable placement that causes the de-tuning, such as a machine placed close to a wall. Antenna de-tuning can cause an M2M device to lose its connection to the network and thus be unable to transmit mission critical data.
The M2M market itself creates another set of challenges for antenna and component vendors. For example, M2M is often price-sensitive in terms of the build-of-materials, but also time-to-market, so vendors have limited ability to spend months designing a custom antenna solution because development time is a cost. An off-the-shelf antenna might appear cheaper and a quicker way to achieve the timeline, but there’s a good chance that it won’t be able to meet the unique requirements of each device because its design isn’t flexible enough to accommodate a variety of RF-environments and frequency bands. An off-the-shelf antenna requires integration services from an experienced antenna expert to successfully bring a product to market. However, many M2M vendors don’t usually have the large RF engineering staffs that their smartphone and tablet vendors count on to integrate a custom solution and go through the iterative design process until the product meets operator certification.
M2M vendors also face many of the same challenges as their smartphone and tablet peers, which have to contend with an annual 25% reduction in the space available for the RF front end. At that rate, it won’t be long before the entire front end will need to squeeze into the space once occupied solely by the antenna. For M2M vendors, the good news is that they can benefit from advances in active antenna system technology developed to help smartphone and tablet designers cope with ever shrinking spaces.
Active antennas are key
All of these engineering and marketplace requirements are challenging for antenna vendors that have limited or no M2M experience and provide standard, off-the-shelf passive antennas: in many cases, their products will not meet their customers’ needs for providing reliable, high-performance connections for mission-critical applications.
Antenna vendors with extensive experience integrating multi-band antennas into small-volume devices – not only smartphones and tablets, but also a wide variety of M2M form factors are key to a successful product. This experience enables the antenna vendor to quickly identify both the challenges and the best solutions to provide a design rapidly and cost-effectively, instead of spending months of multiple iterations to find something that will meet the customer’s performance requirements. Additionally, the antenna vendor should be set-up as a global platform company with design centers in key regions around the world to be close to customers. This is key as the product moves from the design phase with the original equipment manufacturers, or an original design manufacturer, to production at a contract manufacturer’s facility. The platform approach enables local support with a seamless transition through the product’s life cycle. Put simply, the experienced vendor has “been there, done that” enough times that it can leverage its design expertise and global platform approach to swiftly and efficiently deliver a high-performance design for its customer and move to production quickly.
For the antenna vendor to successfully face upcoming challenges, a key component is a portfolio that includes active antenna systems, which can be dynamically tuned, through active components including supporting the development of algorithms, to cover significantly wider bandwidths, achieve smaller physical volumes and provide more degrees of freedom in the design process. An active antenna system’s flexibility enables minimal modifications to meet unique customer requirements, such as installing the antenna system by a metal surface or supporting LTE bands as well as fallback to 3G/2.5G/2G bands, such as when a tele-medicine provider wants to have a single SKU connect to patients nearly anywhere. Additionally, active antennas’ flexibility helps M2M vendors pass carrier certification on the first attempt, so the devices get to market faster bringing in revenue streams sooner.
A quick way to address all the challenges as well as the overall scalability of the business is to provide an antenna system module with minimal customization. The ability to dynamically sense and optimize the antenna system enables an active antenna system to maintain optimal performance and connectivity even when the module is installed on any type of surface, even metal, that would wreak havoc with a passive antenna. The flexibility of an active antenna system design, along with closed loop impedance matching, enables M2M vendors to develop a single platform that can be quickly and cost-effectively integrated to meet the unique requirements of each new application. By comparison, passive designs typically require extensive and expensive customization and are unable to cover the large bandwidths required for 2G/3G/4G and ISM implementations due to the limited space available.
The M2M market is booming because it provides solutions to real-world problems: minimizing truck rolls, tracking high-value cargo and connecting patients with physicians, to name just a few. This module-based approach is the first step toward a new way of thinking about RF design for M2M devices and other markets. A plug-and-play foundation enables solutions that are repeatable and flexible enough for nearly any M2M application – not only delivering the highest levels of performance but also setting the innovators from the rest of the pack.
Jeff Shamblin is the Chief Scientist at Ethertronics, and is responsible for overseeing all research and development projects for the corporation. Shamblin brings 29 years experience in antenna engineering to this position. Before joining Ethertronics, Shamblin worked for two RFID start-up companies, SCS and Claridy Solutions. At Claridy he was the manager in charge of antenna development and assisted in all aspects of RFID relating to antenna and scattering issues. Shamblin previously worked as an antenna consultant providing design and analysis services to several wireless start-ups in the Southern California area. Prior to his work in RFID Shamblin spent more than 20 years in antenna design and development in the aerospace industry at Lockheed and Northrop where he was responsible for several antenna designs on various aircraft and missile programs. He holds seven patents relating to antenna technology. Shamblin earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from California State University, Northridge.
