IEEE Launches Product Safety Engineering Society

Illustration by TAISHA PAYTON

After years under the wings of the EMC Society, product safety engineers now have their own society—the first new technical area approved by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in nearly 20 years.

The Product Safety Engineering Society (http://www.ieee-pses.org) will begin accepting new members in 2004. The new society, which grew out of the EMC Society's product safety technical committee (TC-8), targets design professionals and design engineers interested in electrical product safety.

The new society was established to fill a void in the electrical and electronics engineering fields, says Daniece Carpenter, cochair of the TC-8's technical activities board committee. The committee was key in the formation of the new society.

"While product safety has been addressed in various committees over the years, there has not been a widely accepted professional organization solely devoted to product safety engineering as a discipline," Carpenter says. "Now IEEE has established a home for this important technical field."

The newly formed group plans to work closely with other IEEE societies and councils that include product safety engineering as a technical specialty. The group has already identified as many as eight other societies with some interest in product safety, according to Mark Montrose, treasurer of TC-8. In addition, the society will work with non-IEEE groups such as the Northeast Product Safety Society (http://www.nepss.org). Montrose spoke at an organizational meeting at the EMC Symposium in August. He said the society will promote the coordination of product safety among all IEEE entities.

The society will address safety engineering for equipment and devices used in the scientific, engineering, industrial, commercial, and residential arenas. The group plans to offer conferences of applied workshops on topics such as creepage and clearance, electrical shock, theory, and design. The group will focus on standards development as well.

The new society already has local groups in several cities that will be formed into chapters, and others will be started as demand dictates. IEEE members can join the society during the renewal period for the 2004 membership period at http://www.ieee.org/renew. For the first two years, membership fees will be $35 per year. They will increase to $40 in 2006.

IEEE has 37 other societies ranging from aerospace, computers, and telecommunications to biomedicine, electric power, and consumer electronics.

WRC Allocates Spectrum to Mobile Devices

Mobile devices can now operate worldwide in 455 MHz of bandwidth in the 5 GHz range. Devices, including radio local-area networks (RLANs), got the approval from delegates at the World Radiocommunication Conference (WRC) in July.

The allocation harmonizes the spectrum available for RLANs, and it lowers development costs for networks. Lower costs will likely have a positive effect on the deployment of broadband capabilities in developing countries. The radio group allocated the following bands: 5150-5250, 5250-5350, and 5470-5725 MHz. An outdoor allocation was subject to agreement by Committee 5 prior to approval at the WRC plenary session. Outdoor use of RLAN devices can occur in 355 of the newly allocated 455 MHz of spectrum.

The WRC resolution requests that countries take "appropriate measures" to operate a "predominant number of stations" indoors, although the resolution permits outdoor use in the 5250-5350 MHz range. This particular band is already available for use in the United States where many qualified devices, such as laptops and PDAs, are intended for indoor use.

Standard Allows Spectrum for Simple Devices

A new standard opens up wireless communications technology to inexpensive applications such as sensors and switches. The standard provides for low-data-rate connectivity among relatively simple devices that consume minimal power and typically connect at distances of 10 m (30 ft) or less.

In addition to sensors, applications include smart tags and badges, interactive toys, and inventory tracking. The new standard allows these fixed, portable, and moving devices to form short-range ad hoc networks within which they can interact directly.

The standard, IEEE 802.15.4, is titled "Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Low Rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (LR-WPANs)." Wireless links under IEEE 802.15.4 can operate in three unlicensed frequency bands, accommodating data rates of 20 Kb/sec in the 858 MHz band, 40 Kb/sec in the 902-928 MHz band, and 250 Kb/sec in the 2.4 GHz band.

"It is the first wireless scheme to allow simple sensor and actuator devices to share a single standardized platform," according to Jose A. Gutierrez, chief technical editor of the standard. He says the 802.15.4 specification complements the 802 set of wireless standards to enable sensor-rich environments.

"It accommodates lower-end applications by trading off higher speed and performance for architectures that benefit from low power consumption and cost," he says.

The standard allows the creation of self-configuring, multihop network topologies for lines of communication exceeding 30 ft. It also provides features that allow devices operating under the standard to coexist with other wireless devices, such as those that comply with IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) and IEEE 802.15.1 or Bluetooth.

"We believe a host of new applications will be based on the standard. These might include motion sensors that control lights or alarms, wall switches that can be moved at will, and meter reader devices that work from outside a house," says Pat Kinney, chair of IEEE 802.15 Task Group 4.

Top Speed Increases for WPANs

The top speed of wireless personal area networks (WPANs) has increased from 1 to 55 Mb/sec under a new standard. The increase opens the door for the broad use of multimedia, digital imaging, high-quality audio, and other high-bandwidth WPAN applications that need a wireless solution.

The higher speed means that low-cost and low-power devices have access to high data rates and robust quality of service (QoS). The standard allows a WPAN to link as many as 245 wireless consumer devices in a home at data rates up to 55 Mb/sec at distances from a few centimeters to 100 m. It provides for high-rate wireless connectivity in the 2.4 GHz unlicensed frequency band among fixed and portable devices.

The standard, IEEE 802.15.3, is titled "Wireless Medium Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) Specifications for Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN)."

The standard includes all the elements needed for reliable QoS. It uses time division multiple access to allocate channel time among devices to prevent conflicts and provides new allocations for an application only if enough bandwidth is available. Devices that implement 802.15.3 connect in an ad hoc manner and communicate by peer-to-peer networking, allowing them to connect without user intervention.

Networks formed under 802.15.3 are configured so that they coexist with other 802.15 WPANs, such as Bluetooth systems, and with 802.11 wireless local-area networks, such as Wi-Fi systems.

Data Rate Increases for 802.11b WLANs

IEEE 802.11b, a widely used wireless local-area network (WLAN) technology, has gotten a long-awaited increase in speed through a new amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard ratified by the standards board of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The amendment, IEEE 802.11g, raises the data rate of IEEE 802.11b networks from 11 Mb/sec to 54 Mb/sec.

The added transmission speed gives wireless networks based on IEEE 802.11b (often called Wi-Fi) the ability to serve up to four or five times more users than they do now. It also opens the possibility for using IEEE 802.11 networks in more-demanding applications, such as wireless multimedia video transmission and broadcast MPEG. The new amendment allows IEEE 802.11g units to fall back to speeds of 11 Mb/sec, so IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g devices can coexist in the same network.

The two standards apply to the 2.4 GHz frequency band. IEEE 802.11g creates data-rate parity at 2.4 GHz with the IEEE 802.11a standard, which has a 54 Mb/sec rate at 5 GHz. "IEEE 802.11g gives WLAN suppliers and users flexibility in choosing systems that best fit their needs," says Stuart J. Kerry, IEEE 802.11 Working Group chair. "Given the millions of 802.11b-based WLANs in place worldwide, the market demand for the extension to 54 Mb/sec has been quite strong. The higher speed extends the use of this widely deployed WLAN technology into a growing variety of networking applications, he says.

Kerry explains that in addition to making IEEE 802.11b networks more efficient, the new amendment ensures users that the equipment in these networks will be interoperable.