Predictions on Course
by Paul McGoldrick
In my first editorial of this year I made some predictions of where our industry was/is going through the course of the year. I just read that piece again to see how the things I foresaw were doing, and am pleased to see that the majority of what I wrote is either in process or has actually happened. The corporate world-things are in process, I believe, and I will leave those to revisit at year's end - as I promised - but in the market environment we have seen that the majority of analog business is in recovery; tick-by-tick things are improving, even in the wireless world, but there are no signs of a turnaround in the optical world.
Although I got the time frame for a general analog recovery right - and that is not yet a world event, certainly not in N. American business - the optical recovery is going to take even longer than I predicted. I said sometime around the first six months of the year but the indications are that it is going to be much later, probably well into the fourth quarter but, hopefully, not into 2003.
And with that time frame there are going to be at least two, almost purely optical, vendors in quite serious condition. One of them is looking for partnerships, which could very well lead to an acquisition, and one is getting ready to divest from optical completely. Neither company should or had to be in the position they have rather wrought for themselves, and I have to continue to wonder about the management of some public companies and the motives for which they are run by such management.
There is still money to be made in the optical world by producing products that reach further, integrate more and are more cost-effective, but the markets in the really highly numbered OC- standards are not going to happen this year, nor I believe in 2003. However, OC-48, for example, is well-established and product is moving well, if not explosively. Unfortunately for the optical specialists, but good for the general analog business, the conventional producers of silicon see their processes in both pure CMOS and Bipolar compounds reaching the numbers that make sense for the OEMs to design in.
In other arenas we have Wireless LAN going mainstream in IEEE 802.11b and now 802.11a while 802.11g, although technically superior for the already crowded 2.4-GHz ISM band, is going to have to overcome some major technical hurdles and may not be in time to really kick 802.11b out of an established position. During a panel that I moderated at IMS 2002 last week, the panelists were convinced that the 2.4-GHz spectrum will still be in use in years to come - and that users would choose whether they wanted to use their microwave or their network. I'm not nearly as sure about that: There are always spectrum abusers and although the FCC might chase, and fine, a pirate radio station or two a month it has limited facilities to go chasing ISM abusers.
Bluetooth is…well, Bluetooth…and I have the feeling that product use is going to be decided by OEM industry groups. If PC manufacturers adopt in bulk, for example, it will do well, although I personally think its ideal uses are for things like remote cell phone earpieces and microphones. The hype has been so long in coming that it is difficult to tell whether it has arrived or not.
The recently-legalized Ultra Wideband (UW) is already a reality in military/security equipment and we should see some commercialized ground-penetrating radar breakthroughs within the next nine months. From a communications standpoint I doubt that systems will be adopted for at least a year, maybe even two, and there is still going to be some legal hassles in its future.
Apart from stretching out the recovery dates for optical I am not going
to make any new mid-year predictions for corporate events; we'll let the
year play out, then we'll revisit my January words and see whether I have
the courage to do the same for 2003. If I have a high hit rate I probably
will: If I have a low hit rate I'll probably retire my crystal LCD screen
for a while. There is no satisfaction in not being able to say, "I
told you so!"