Communications [technology 1999 analysis and forecast]

Never before in the field of electronic communication has so much been changed so rapidly by so many. All over the world, engineers are adding new service capabilities and refining old ones. Meanwhile, business entities merge and split in a frantic attempt to stay profitable in an industry whose ramifications and future are becoming increasingly unclear. Part of the confusion, of course, comes from an untried concept in the communications business: local competition. Making the situation even more interesting, the Internet has evolved from a quirky tool into what might well be the future basis for long-distance telephony. On the cellular front, satellite based systems that provide truly worldwide access have become a reality though whether they will be a profitable one remains to be seen. While that drama is playing out, cellular operators and equipment suppliers are hotly debating the nature of the third generation (the second digital generation) of cell phones and services. In local-area networks, Gigabit Ethernet has gone from infancy to early adulthood in about 18 months, while asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) has established itself in wide-area nets, it may yet realize its potential in local-area nets as well     

Transportation [1999 technology analysis and forecast]

This article presents a transportation technology analysis and forecast for 1999. The subjects covered include automated toll collection, automobile navigation automation, high-speed electric railways, Maglev and rapid transit systems     

Computers [1999 technology forecast and analysis]

This paper presents a computer technology analysis and forecast for 1999. The subjects covered include personal computers, magnetic disk storage, open operating systems, digital versatile disks and supercomputers     

Medical electronics [technology 1999 analysis and forecast]

By taking technologies already in use, experimenters hope to help the arthritic, the nearsighted, and those with internal disorders. And a novel bone technique has just obtained premarket approval from the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Rockville, Md. Optical coherence tomography, originally developed to image eye tissues and artery-clogging plaques, is now being enhanced for the early detection of joint disease. Microwave heating is being developed to correct misshapen corneas found in visual disorders like myopia. In a magnetic resonance imager, a superconducting probe is shown to provide clearer images than a probe at room temperature. And the FDA action applies to a portable, noninvasive unit that uses an electromagnetic field to stimulate bone growth     

The environment [1999 technology analysis and forecast]

This article presents an environment technology analysis and forecast for 1999. The subjects covered include end-of-life draft legislation, water treatment options, outsourcing liabilities, greenhouse gas reduction and design for environment concepts     

The Internet [technology 1999 analysis and forecast]

Despite 1998's early doom'n'gloom projections of a gigantic logjam-or even a complete Net shutdown-the giant network of networks survived remarkably well. In fact, the Net has grown more robust despite its marked growth. Ambition keeps paying off. The bandwidth and experimental multimedia plans ushered in last year by several bandwidth firms are moving full speed ahead. Additionally with infrastructure technologies in place, and Java on track as a de facto Internet language standard, several Net engineers are again using the Internet as their own techno-playground     

Industrial electronics [technology 1999 analysis and forecast]

In old markets and new, power electronics, robots, intelligent control, and connectivity are becoming the pillars of industrial electronics and factory automation. Consider the integrated gate-commutated thyristor (IGCT). In the 18 months since its introduction by a Wisconsin company, motor drives based on the thyristor are already making a dent in the market for medium voltage and power levels-up to 6.6 kV and 10 MW-not least because other devices operate at similar power levels but higher losses. In the control and connectivity fields, open systems are vigorously pursued. Software and hardware advances in Java language technology are allowing manufacturers to break through the restrictions of proprietary systems and test real-time factory automation over the Internet, involving text, numerical data, and graphics. Open networking for the factory is strongly advocated by such industry leaders as Hirschmann Network Systems, in Riverdale, NJ and on printed-circuit boards, the use of vias under 150 μm in diameter (microvias) is taking hold, as packaging concepts like ball grid arrays cause component leads to shrink     

Software engineering [technology 1999 analysis and forecast]

More than ever, the nature of software engineering is determined by standards, whether set by an organization or decided by the marketplace. So the ability to control and direct those standards' development is seen by some companies as vital to their future. Witness the battle being waged over Java, the software language that is firmly establishing object oriented technology as the cornerstone of the modern networked enterprise. And witness, too, the way standards are being treated by those who create Web software     

Power and energy [1999 technology analysis and forecast]

This article presents a power and energy technology analysis and forecast for 1999. The subjects covered include photovoltaics, PV power systems, solar arrays, nuclear power and free market spot electricity pricing     

Test and measurements [1999 technology analysis and forecast]

This article presents a test and measurements technology analysis and forecast for 1999. The subject covered include network instruments, virtual testers, measurement automation, data security and PC-based next-generation instruments     

Aerospace and military [technology 1999 analysis and forecast]

The Pentagon is making good on its new slogans of situational awareness and the age of the digital battlefield. These phrases signify, in essence, a revolutionary change in the time-honored concept of thousands of soldiers toiling as one, both to fight physically and to render information upwards. Many of the same tasks will be done by an astounding diversity of new “assets”-humans and machines. If the Pentagon devotes equal or more attention to technologies that fuse, filter, and coherently present the overflow of received data, the tactical and strategic opportunities offered by the following systems can only increase. In a sense, new Pentagon designs systematically blur the distinction between the destructive power of weapons and active intelligence agents that facilitate that power. Thus, autonomous weapons of the new type may gather signal intelligence and distribute it to assets it chooses, like a human intelligence agent of old, and phalanxes of unmanned platforms move through unknown environments either as scouts or as fighters, avoiding obstacles and releasing weapons as they choose. Some unmanned air reconnaissance platforms mentioned can traverse continents, and may bulk up to tele-operated attack jets or shrink to butterfly-sized aircraft humming along by themselves. On the field, mines are mutating into wide-area networks of robotic munitions launchers. Thinking even smaller, engineers have come up with networked tell-tale radio-frequency tags and data communications for rifles     

Solid state [semiconductors. 1999 technology analysis and forecast]

This article presents a solid-state semiconductor technology analysis and forecast for 1999. The subjects covered include semiconductor technology roadmap targets, silicon-germanium components, silicon-on-insulator ICs, copper IC interconnects and microelectromechanical systems     

Communications [technology analysis and forecast]

Several spectacular changes in the communications scene over the past few years will have a still stronger impact in 1997. Most obviously, the World Wide Web has been expanding. Showing a nice mixture of optimism and concern, the telecommunications establishment is mulling how best to exploit the Web commercially while deploying such packet-switched networks as the integrated services digital network (ISDN) and such subscriber access technologies as asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) to keep the telecom infrastructure from being overwhelmed. Amid the competitive pressures generated by deregulation, telecom companies have more incentive than ever to squeeze as much performance as possible out of their existing infrastructure. Hence the attraction of local-access technologies like ADSL for boosting the capacity of installed copper subscriber loops, and long-haul technologies like wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) for boosting the capacity of installed optical fiber. Wireless local-area networks (LANs) are benefiting from spread-spectrum technology, just as cellular telephony is. Also planned is provision of satellite-based, global mobile voice and datacom services to pocketsized, hand-held devices     

Technical software [Technology 2000 analysis and forecast]

Twenty years ago, only a handful of visionaries could have predicted that powerful software born of supercomputing would butt its way into almost every desktop PC. Few foresaw the scale of data that would be manipulated or the complexity of the tasks that would be performed by software tools costing a few hundred dollars. But now, all developers of technical software take it as given that users may need to process gigabytes of data drawn from a combination of sources: instrument output; archived data; and publicly available materials, such as census data downloaded from the Internet. In this paper, the author argues that, in a sophisticated marketplace, the success of those developers hinges on equipping users to gain ever swifter insight into many reams of data     

Basic science [Technology 1998 analysis and forecast]

The smaller they make their devices, the closer electronics engineers come to entering the world of quantum mechanics, that wonderland where the rules of physics differ drastically from those of the macroscopic world people experience with their senses. In one example, physicists and engineers are creating so-called quantum dots and are investigating how to use them in new forms of electronics. They aspire to transmit data not by tiny currents, but by single electrons that hop from one quantum dot to the next. Probably the one thing generally known about quantum mechanics is that matter-despite its particulate nature-may behave like a wave. This idea was emphasized once again last year when a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge, produced coherent beams of matter in what the group refers to as an atom laser. (The same group just two years ago produced an entirely new state of matter known as Bose-Einstein condensates.) Elsewhere, scientists in France have succeeded in detecting decoherence, the transition from the quantum world into the macroscopic world, by contriving systems that can be in two quantum states at the same time, albeit briefly. Also in France, physicists have shown how to exploit chaos to encrypt optically transmitted data. This finding might eventually be useful in ultrafast applications, such as the scrambling and unscrambling of television signals transmitted over optical fibers     

Software engineering [technology analysis and forecast]

A year ago, the map of software engineering seemed etched in stone. At its imperial center was Microsoft Corp., surrounded by the minor feudal states that had to pay it homage and live under its sway. But by year's end, the Internet had destabilized the empire and it was unclear whether the center would hold. Thus, 1997 will likely be supercharged-with change-mostly for the good of software engineering. It will certainly be a year in which many of the things people have wanted from software will actually be delivered. The author discusses Java, virtual reality, speech processing, security, and software quality     

Software tools [technology analysis and forecast]

Many engineering software applications migrated last year from Unix to the Windows NT operating system. An unaccustomed camaraderie-interoperability-spread among applications from different vendors and between different stages of the design process. Meanwhile, the mainstream of electronic design got a new supreme court: formal verification. In the course of 1997, the migration from Unix to Windows NT, the growing need for interoperability and powerful verification tools, and the great HDL debate will continue. Added to these issues will be the evolution of the desktop computer into the platform for both engineering and administrative applications, new approaches to embedded and digital signal processing (DSP) design, and the impact of the World Wide Web     

Industrial electronics [technology analysis and forecast]

A rapprochement among different vendors of industrial control equipment may be at hand if several systems presented as “open architecture” ones are any indication. Meanwhile, the advent of single-chip microcontrollers for motor drives, more powerful insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), and improved integration of sensors with power devices are salient advances on the factory floor. The new crop of industrial computers, including single-board types embedded in larger systems, emphasizes increased power often in a smaller package. As for signal processing, gains include a system for surveillance (in the plant and on the battlefield) that fuses data from two sources into one stream of enhanced precision, while digital signal processing pushes a PC-based vision system to some 10¹¹ operations per second     

Test and measurement [technology analysis and forecast]

In ever greater numbers, new entries in the test and measurement field are heeding that litany of characteristics so prayed for by all electronikers: smaller, faster, cheaper-and easier to use. Bulky benchtop instruments are giving way to portable counterparts. The latest generation of microprocessors is boosting test equipment speed, while (relatively) inexpensive instruments are becoming the norm rather than the exception. Perhaps most important in what may come to be known as The Age of Complexity, manufacturers are steadily improving the user-interfaces of their instruments, trying to make them both easy to learn and a snap to relearn. The author discusses application specific instruments, the trend to multi-instrument boxes, and test feedback to manufacturing to improve boards     

Electronic design automation [1999 technology analysis andforecast]

This article presents an electronic design automation technology analysis and forecast for 1999. The subjects covered include: IC design moving to a higher level of abstraction; IC design reuse; and hardware/software integration