The IEEE Communications Society (IEEE ComSoc) has observed its 60th year dedicated to the development of communications professionals worldwide and the advance of the entire range of broadband, wireless, multimedia, data, image and voice technologies. Founded in 1952, IEEE ComSoc, which has over 50,000 members and stands as the second largest of IEEE’s 38 technical societies, is recognized internationally for its premier conferencing events, industry-leading technical publications and journals, world-class certification and educational programs, and global network of technical professionals and standardization projects.

“IEEE ComSoc is a truly global organization with nearly 60 percent of our membership representing countries outside of North America,” explains Vijay Bhargava, the President of IEEE ComSoc. “We have achieved this accomplishment by flexibly responding to the informational demands of our members, while creating an atmosphere of equitable participation that is actively producing a new generation of leaders and the means to affordably communicate among all different sectors of humanity.”

“As the world’s leading communications engineering Society, we are proud to have maintained the highest professional standards, while operating in a spirit of mutual respect and collaboration,” says Steve Weinstein, Chair of ComSoc’s Communications History Committee. “As a result, our intellectual community benefits not only from global coordination with peers and colleagues on the latest technical trends, but also from the opportunity to develop long-term friendships and more successful careers through a well developed network of professional activities.”

Originally founded with the formation of IRE’s (the Institute of Radio Engineers) Professional Group on Communications Systems (PGCS), the organization was officially relaunched as the IEEE Communications Society and as an independent Society of The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1972. Beginning with 8,800 individuals, the Society’s membership has grown by more than 500 percent over the past 40 years and now includes more than 200 international Chapters and working relationships with an additional 30 international Societies to extend its international reach to another 500,000 engineers, scientists and industry professionals.

Since its inception, and most recently under Past President Byeong Gi Lee from Korea and President Vijay Bhargava from Canada, IEEE ComSoc has facilitated this tremendous growth through an unrelenting emphasis on globalization, the development of young leadership and industrial cooperation. This includes steadily incorporating global cultures and values into ComSoc operations; utilizing the best talent, education and training to secure open career paths filled with advancement; and working in direct conjunction with corporate leaders to create the next wave of technical innovations, products and services.

Article source: http://www.pcb007.com/pages/zone.cgi?a=84137

MarketResearch.com has announced the addition of the new report “Lighting Fixtures,” to their collection of Lighting LED Market market reports. For more information, click here.

Demand for lighting fixtures in the US is projected to increase 7.4 percent annually to $25.1 billion in 2016. This represents a recovery from the declines posted between 2006 and 2011, as both motor vehicle production and construction activity recover from low 2011 levels.

The commercialization of light emitting diode (LED) lighting is also having a significant impact on the industry. LEDs are longer-lived and more energy efficient than incandescent lamps but currently only account for a small share of demand. LED-based lighting fixtures are expected to provide especially strong growth through 2016 due to the rapid pace of technological advances in the LED light sources which will make them more energy-efficient, brighter and more affordable. In addition, while some LEDs can be used in place of traditional incandescent bulbs, lighting fixture manufacturers are also developing fixtures which are specifically designed for LEDs and help to optimize their performance.

Lighting fixture products include non-portable and portable fixtures, as well as separately sold parts and accessories such as aftermarket lamp ballasts, fittings, switches, globes and shades. Demand for lighting fixtures is dominated by non-portable fixtures, which accounted for nearly two-thirds of total lighting fixture demand in 2011. Non-portable fixtures derive their dominant position from widespread use in the full range of construction and vehicular applications. Demand for non-portable fixtures is also expected to post the strongest gains through 2016, benefiting from the rebound in construction activity and vehicle production.

The residential market is expected to post the strongest gains, nearly doubling between 2011 and 2016, as new residential construction activity rebounds. While demand in new housing will provide the larger share of growth, the residential repair and improvement segment will also rise from low 2011 levels, supported by both increasing housing sales and greater consumer spending.

Throughout every major market segment, products that reduce the energy consumption of lighting will see the best prospects for growth. Much of this can be attributed to regulations banning the future sale of less energy-efficient lighting products, including the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007′s restrictions on the sale of incandescent lamps. These regulatory efforts will spur increased demand for lighting fixtures designed to work with fluorescent, halogen, high-intensity discharge and LED light sources.

About MarketResearch.com

MarketResearch.com is the leading provider of global market intelligence products and services. With research reports from more than 720 top consulting and advisory firms, MarketResearch.com offers instant online access to the world’s most extensive database of expert insights on global industries, companies, products, and trends. Moreover, MarketResearch.com’s Research Specialists have in-depth knowledge of the publishers and the various types of reports in their respective industries and are ready to provide research assistance. For more information, call Veronica Franco at 240-747-3016 or visit http://www.marketresearch.com.

Article source: http://www.pcb007.com/pages/zone.cgi?a=84151

For commercial off-the-shelf antennas to used for medical body area networks they must be able to operate in an environment that they were not generally designed for, next to the human body instead of in free space, writes Simon Kingsley

Radio and wireless networks are finding an increasing role in improving our health and fitness.

In these health and fitness applications there may be a number of different biosensors placed on, or in, the human body and linked together or to a central unit so that the body’s performance can be monitored remotely. If on-body sensors are light enough, and the links are made wireless, then the patient or sportsman can have considerable mobility, thus improving patient/client acceptability.

These on-body sensor systems are often called wireless body area networks (WBANs) and might typically consist of several wearable body sensor units, each containing a biosensor, radio, antenna and some on-board control and computation.

Generally WBANs use low-power, short-range radio communication systems such as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) or ZigBee. BLE is a low power version of Bluetooth that is capable of reporting data from a sensor for up to a year from a small button battery without recharging.

Although the BLE data rate and radio range is lower than that of classic Bluetooth, the low-power and long battery life make it suitable for short range monitoring applications in medicine. ZigBee is a similar low-power, low data-rate radio protocol.

The short range limitations of these radio systems may be overcome by collecting the data from the various sensors at a local central unit and then retransmitting it over longer distances to locations where there are staff qualified to interpret the information.

In this case more powerful radio technologies such as GSM or 3G may be used for the long range link. This type of longer ranger monitoring is generally termed Telecare, Telehealth or m-Health (when mobile communications are used). These terms may also be used to describe the delivery of health information and advice by telecommunications networks.

Clearly the development of WBANs and radio monitoring of the body is an interdisciplinary activity requiring a number of different technologies to be brought together. When researching and developing these new and complex radio systems, an important question is whether the problem can be simplified and cost reduced by making use of standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) components.

Can commercial off-the-shelf antennas be used for telecare and body area networks? This is not a straightforward question because it requires antennas to work in an environment that they were not generally designed for, i.e. next to the human body instead of in free space.

COTS antennas
COTS components have been a requirement in the military sector for many years and have been adopted by non-military sectors as well. To qualify as a COTS component it must be on sale in the general marketplace where it is available in significant numbers.

There are essentially three types of commercial antennas on sale – customised, standard and radio-antenna modules. Customised antennas are developed for products such as mobile phone handsets where space is limited, many different radio bands must be accommodated and there are other components such as speakers and cameras located in the same part of the phone.

The antenna must be specifically designed to cope with the idiosyncrasies of the phone but, when the device goes into production, the volumes are generally high enough to compensate for the development costs.

Standard antennas are COTS components and are not changed from application to application. They do not have to be purchased directly from the vendor as they can generally be easily obtained from component distributors.

Like most antennas, standard antennas usually require a matching circuit to ensure their input impedance is as close to 50ohms as possible. A matching circuit is just a small network of a few series and parallel capacitors and inductors lying between the antenna and the radio (which itself may not be a perfect 50ohms).

In most applications involving standard or COTS antenna the matching circuit needs to be specially designed, but this is not a significant effort or modification as it just represents a change to the bill of materials for the host application PCB and does not affect the physical construction of the antenna itself.

A low cost standard antenna with a suitable matching circuit would seem ideal for WBANs and telecare applications but there are two potential drawbacks that we must consider.

The first of these is that standard antennas are designed to work in free space or to be located on a PCB. The most important factor affecting the resonant frequency of an antenna is the relative permittivity of its immediate surroundings.

For free space this is defined as unity and for FR4, a common PCB material, it is around 4.4. The same antenna can generally be made to work in either location by making suitable changes to the matching circuit.

However, when worn next to the human body as part of an on-body sensor, we must consider the relative permittivity and the conductivity of the skin and body and how this affects the antenna. The relative permittivity of skin is about 37.5 and for blood it is about 58. The effect of these high dielectric constants, and the conductivity of the body, can cause both significant losses and a major detuning effect on the antenna.

The second drawback in using on-body antennas for health monitoring is that the patient/client is usually indoors and here the radio propagation can be severely disrupted by multipath.

Multipath is a well known radio propagation effect whereby the signal travels from transmitter to receiver by more than one path, often by scattering from internal surfaces such as walls, floors and ceilings. The interference between the main signal path and these other scattered signals can lead to cancellation of the radio signal, a deep signal fading effect and a consequent loss of data.

Because of the effect of the human body and the multipath problems, it is not immediately clear that COTS antennas can be used for WBANs and telecare.

The effect of the human body and the multipath propagation was the subject of a research programme at Body-Centric Wireless Sensor Lab (BodyWiSe) at Queen Mary University of London, led by Professor Yang Hao.

The work done by researcher Dave Waddoup used a COTS antenna. supplied by Antenova, which was a 2.4GHz surface mount antenna measuring 15 x 5 x 1 mm.

The antenna is essentially a monopole type of radiator and so must be used on a PCB having a partial ground-plane. Because there is no ground-plane directly under the antenna itself, it remains largely unshielded from the effect of the nearby body.

The researchers at QMUL found that, as expected, this antenna assembly became significantly detuned if placed in direct contact with the body. However, it remains adequately tuned if located 3mm away from the body and, consequently, this 3mm separation was used for all the subsequent ‘on body’ measurements.

The signal losses caused by the presence of the body were found to be about 19 dB compared to the same antenna in free space. This had the effect of reducing the radio link budget and reduced the range of the system.

Interestingly, the signal from the antenna was found to be almost completely depolarised whereas in free space the antenna is strongly linearly polarised. One way to counter both the signal fading due to multipath, and the loss of signal caused by the presence of the human body is to use a link architecture known as MIMO (Multiple Input, Multiple Output).

Here two or more antennas are used at either end of the radio link and multipath effects are exploited to improve the data link. MIMO is only successful, however, when there is good isolation between the closely spaced antennas at either end of the link.

The mutual coupling between antennas on the human body thus became an important measurement for QMUL to make. Widely spaced antennas are usually well isolated from each other but they would occupy a lot of space on the body and might not be convenient to wear.

Fortunately it was found that relocation of the antennas from free space to be ‘on body’ reduced the mutual coupling such that for a given level of coupling between two antennas, their separation could be reduced by a factor of about 2.5 times.

This substantial size reduction increases user acceptability and would be particularly significant for subjects wearing multiple on body sensors in a WBAN Telecare application. 

I discussed custom and standard antennas but so far we have not mentioned the third type of commercial antenna, the radio-antenna module. Here the antenna and radio are designed as a single unit in order to increase efficiency and reduce size and cost.

It is also possible for radio-antenna modules to be made into COTS devices by arranging the pin-out so as to permit an external matching circuit to be used between the on-board antenna and radio.

There is every prospect that in future modules can be designed that incorporate the biosensor and control logic as well as the antenna and radio into a single small and lightweight unit. This should simplify the design of telecare systems and increase user acceptance even further.

Standard, or COTS, antennas are designed to work in free space and it is inevitable that they lose efficiency when used close to the human body. However, it has been found in work carried out at Queen Mary University London that the loss of RF performance can be tolerated and they can be used for short-range WBAN and Telecare applications.

Significantly, it has also been found that pairs of antennas may be placed closer to each other than they can be in free space, for the same degree of mutual coupling. This is an important result because it allows MIMO techniques to be used to improve the data link and opens the door for radio-antenna-biosensor modules to be developed that contain several antennas in a small space.

Simon Kingsley is chief scientist at Antenova

Article source: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/Articles/2012/05/16/53666/personal-body-networks-go-wireless-at-2.4ghz.htm