The Smart Home is a bad dream; here’s how to fix it

The first hurdle to realizing the dream of the smart home is establishing a common “language,” so devices can talk to each other. Today, a welter of confusing networks and communications standards makes interoperability virtually impossible. While there are a lot of so-called smart devices on the market — to automate security, climate control or lighting, for example — one company’s products don’t work with another’s. And, they run on different applications.

What’s worse is that every so often a new group of companies announces an “alliance” to create a new, better communications standard or ecosystem, thereby threatening to obsolete all previous products.

Only a tech nerd can sort it all out. Meanwhile, the average consumer isn’t buying.

As they have done in previous generations of products, the chip guys need to step up. They need to solve this problem with firmware and hardware.

Currently, the semiconductor industry senses great opportunity in supplying silicon building blocks upon which communications and application software can be layered. A dozen manufacturers are fielding wireless microcontrollers, systems on chip (SoCs) that combine low-power microcontrollers integrated with some level of wireless connectivity, (link to http://goo.gl/8K3hdM)
in the form of RF transceivers. They come in as many different flavors as there are wireless technologies: Wi-Fi, ZigBee, 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth, ANT, etc.
What we need is silicon that’s even smarter. My prescription: Instead of a chip for each wireless standard, the trick would be to design a “responsively configurable” transceiver, one that recognizes the prevailing wireless technology in the environment and automatically adapts the SoC to it. It’s important, of course, that this solution be comparable in size and cost to a dedicated transceiver. There is work being done in the field of Software Defined Radio that could be extended to this — a single antenna could be connected to a switched passive filter network, perhaps.

A connected device built with such a chip at its heart would be truly smart; it would automatically work with any network, any communications standard. Interoperability solved. Can it be done?

Continue Reading: http://goo.gl/8K3hdM