Alfred Ip, Senior RF Systems Engineer, Amazon Lab126
“The goal is to solve the problem by achieving the requirement
with minimum effort and at the lowest cost.”
To address the challenges of developing a wireless solution, you must first understand what the wireless solution needs to do. This in turn means understanding basic performance requirements. Those requirements are embedded in customer expectations about how the solution will operate in its intended use case environment. Only by knowing exactly what the solution must do can you translate that information into engineering requirements, and then make decisions that balance competing aspects of the design.
Every engineering team must make decisions about the look of a product, how much innovation it will include, its communication range and speed, and power consumption, each of which influences the others. For example, if you want longer-range communications, you may need a higher milliampere-hour (mA-h) battery, which would determine battery size and selection. These factors affect two other key considerations: cost and time to market. We want more features and a better-looking, more innovative product that we can produce at low cost and get to market quickly. Designing a wireless solution is always a balancing act.
The goal is to solve the problem by achieving the requirement with minimum effort and at the lowest cost. The question is, how do we prioritize these competing factors within the design?
This is an excerpt from 8 Experts on Overcoming Challenges of RF Solution Design. The eBook was generously sponsored by Murata Electronics and Mouser Electronics.
