Microwave Engineering Europe - November 2008 - (Page 4) 4 NEWS By JP Joosting, Microwave Engineering Europe IN BRIEF Inside Contactless to work with FIME on NFC Inside Contactless, the French IC specialist in Near-Field Communications (NFC), is partnering with smartcard terminal testing developer FIME to work on common interoperability and test procedures for mobile payment infrastructure based on NFC. Philippe Betoin, vice president of strategy and device marketing at Inside Contactless, said the intent was not to supplant any efforts of ETSO, ISO, or the NFC Forum, but to offer new interoperability test methods which others in the industry could develop. The effort may lead to multi-vendor “plugfest” events in the future. “Certainly, we have seen significant growth in mobile payments in recent months, but there needs to be more efforts to move interoperability beyond the RF layer, and include higher-layer protocols,” Betoin said. Inside and FIME will work on interfacing SIM cards and other Secure Element modules to the RF subsystem. www.mwee.com/211800444 Startup hosts Zigbee on IP networks — targets utility smart metering Arch Rock has formally announced its Compact Application Protocol, software to host Zigbee applications and services on Internet Protocol networks. The move is the first of what could be many efforts to unify fragmented home control networks for emerging smart metering applications. The announcement comes at a time when an ad hoc group of utility companies is calling for interoperability standards between different control network technologies. The standards would pave the way for their plans to link residential electric meters, thermostats, lights and other devices. The low cost wireless 802.15.4 links used by Zigbee are ideal for electric meters. However, the radios cannot reach from clusters of meters into residences in many apartment buildings, driving a need for powerline or other options, according to Roland Acra, chief executive of Arch Rock. In late August, the utilities along with members of the Zigbee Alliance and the HomePlug Powerline Alliance announced plans to extend the existing Zigbee Smart Energy application profile to run on HomePlug networks. Arch Rock detailed its CAP software as a possible solution to members of the group at its latest meeting on October 9 in Vancouver. Arch Rock, a startup which sells IP sensor networking systems and tools, has been looking for ways to leverage the Zigbee efforts into its vision for leveraging Web technologies to make IP dominant in low end sensor networks. The startup submitted a detailed technical draft of CAP as a suggested draft standard to the Internet Engineering Task Force in early October. Acra said the company is open to any group adopting CAP including the IETF, the Zigbee Alliance or the ad hoc working group of utility companies. CAP marries the application layer profiles and security features of Zigbee on to UDP/IP network and transport layers “without any significant performance penalty,” according to Acra. A full IP sensor node stack requires less than 50 Kbytes, while some Zigbee stacks requires as much as 128 Kbytes. The Arch Rock approach embeds Zigbee application protocol information in UDP packets and chooses a UDP port, allowing devices to communicate using an IP address and port instead of a Zigbee network address. The approach leaves intact the clusters, attributes, commands and data types used by the Zigbee profiles, Arch Rock claims. CAP implements Zigbee APS acknowledgements and retries and security features. Specifically, the Zigbee Trust Center and Zigbee Discovery Cache run on trusted IP hosts under CAP. The Arch Rock approach modifies Zigbee binding commands and discovery commands to include the IP address and port. It’s not clear what other proposals may come before the utilities’ working group. Two other types of powerline technology compete with the HomePlug products. Other home control nets include Insteon, X-10 and LonWorks. www.mwee.com/211300409 TI to sell part of wireless chip unit Texas Instruments said Monday October 20th that it is in discussions with undisclosed potential buyers of its merchant baseband semiconductor business but would continue to support some of its custom baseband customers. The company said it would cut expenses in the wireless business by about one third, or more than $200 million per year, especially in its cellular baseband operation. TI stated that it would focus its remaining wireless investments in OMAP applications processors, which power smartphone products. Reductions in cellular baseband operations will begin immediately and are expected to be complete by June 2009, TI said. The company said it expects to take restructuring charges of approximately $110 million across the next three quarters. www.mwee.com/211800449 Anite and Renesas France announce wireless conformance testing partnership Anite and Renesas Design France (RDF) have announced a strategic partnership in Wireless Conformance testing. RDF has selected Anite’s SAT(H) software test platform, a host test solution for 2G/3G Protocol Stack software, for the validation of the RDF 2G/3G dual mode Protocol Stack. The partnership will also see Anite using the RDF protocol stack as a reference design to accelerate the development of the conformance test cases required for the industry certification of wireless devices. As the complexity of wireless technology increases, it is essential to adopt the most effective product testing regimes to control time-to-market timescales. The Anite SAT(H) platform supports the company’s popular range of test and measurement applications, including Development Toolset, Conformance Toolset and SAS, and extends the range of testing that can be performed during the crucial early stages of protocol stack development. A key benefit of the SAT(H) approach is that protocol stack validation may take place in a purely software environment, providing high quality testing before the integration of the protocol stack with hardware. www.mwee.com/211800408 Microwave Engineering Europe ● November 2008 ● www.mwee.com http://www.mwee.com/211800444 http://www.mwee.com/211300409 http://www.mwee.com/211800408 http://www.mwee.com/211800449 http://www.mwee.com
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