e-Newsletter: Archives

April/May 2005 edition

Wi-Fi Growth Fueled by Adoption in Consumer Electronics

By Bill Carney, director of marketing and business development, digital signal processing systems, residential gateway and embedded systems group, Texas Instruments Incorporated.

The engine of technical innovation churns continuously. Some advancements appear as product extensions, and others as entirely new product families. Amidst this relentless pace, only a few products reach mass-scale adoption and bring truly substantial benefits to consumers.

In the last few years, no innovation stands out more prominently than the advent and adoption of Wi-Fi. One arena to watch for significant developments is end product applications with wide scale adoption of Wi-Fi in increasingly diverse product categories.

Wi-Fi in Everything

The stage is set for broader adoption of Wi-Fi in products well beyond today's traditional applications. Wi-Fi is already commonplace in laptops, businesses and home networking gear and is also starting to appear in additional products, and in more than just a novelty fashion. Wi-Fi adoption is truly at an inflection point, moving beyond stand-alone, data-centric products. Rapid growth is forecasted as more devices embrace wireless connectivity. In-Stat estimates that there will be 390 million WLAN integrated circuit shipments by 2008.

Three chief segments are expected to see rapid and substantial uptake of enhanced Wi-Fi functionality: home/residential gateways; mobile handsets; and consumer electronics (CE). For the purposes of this article, we'll focus on the latter.

Market Drivers for Wi-Fi in Consumer Electronics

One of the most significant market opportunities for Wi-Fi is the consumer electronics space. Key drivers for WLAN in CE equipment include:

• The rapid adoption of broadband Internet connections—the use of broadband Internet connections is growing, both in the United States and worldwide, particularly in Asia.
• The increased use of networks to share these connections—consumers with broadband access are creating home networks to share content among multiple PCs, particularly in the United States, where multiple PCs per household are common. Consumer electronics will soon link to these networks as well.
• The generation of digital content and the need to share it—consumers are creating vast amounts of digital content that they want to access anywhere, anytime and from any location.

Market Uptake

Will the TV you purchase next week feature Wi-Fi functionality? Probably not. Adding Wi-Fi to consumer electronics will occur in phases. Products already shipping in volume like MP3 players, digital still cameras, printers and gaming consoles will most likely be the first to be embedded with Wi-Fi features. Over time, we'll likely see Wi-Fi capabilities as standard fare in low- to high-end CE devices.

Wi-Fi is Improving

In addition to wide scale adoption of Wi-Fi in diverse product categories, significant developments are occurring in the feature arena, principally performance and capability improvements.

Wi-Fi technology is based upon an open standard known as 802.11, the responsibility and creation of the IEEE Working Group of the same numerical designation. Most people who are knowledgeable about Wi-Fi are also familiar with the three different Physical Layer specifications currently in commercial production. These are commonly known as 802.11b, 802.11g and 802.11a. Within this framework of specifications, there are a number of other enhancements and extensions to the underlying standard being proposed and under development that will bring new applications and features to Wi-Fi embedded products.

One key effort that pertains to the area of consumer electronics is the ratification of the 802.11n specification. The constant quest in networking technology development is to find the ability to perform better and operate faster. The Working Group will define the next Physical Layer specification which allows throughput speed in excess of 100Mbps. While 802.11 g and b/g are sufficient for consumer electronics applications like Wi-Fi enabled MP3 players, high-end applications, such as HDTV that transmit video, need 802.11n, a much more compelling standard.

The integration of 802.11 at the system level will become standard, and will be as easy as adding a USB port is today. And, in the near future, it is easy to envision integration at the chip level, with 802.11 becoming just a small portion of the overall host processor. Once the technology reaches that level of acceptance, the possibilities are limitless in how it can be used to connect products and people to each other and the Internet.

Companies that are best positioned to understand the demands of consumer, wireless and entertainment markets are tapping into this growth potential today and will do so well into the future.

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