DISCOVER TOP TECH VOICES: Jaap Haartsen & The Future of Electronics Technology
Welcome to Top Tech Voices. I'm Georgia Lewis Anderson, an AI consultant and your host for this journey into the heart of modern technology, where we're going to be asking what the future might hold. In this series, we're going to get into the big topics, shaping how our world is changing and question what might be coming next. We're going to be talking directly to the experts who are going to be sharing their insights on the changes unfolding around us as we enter what many are calling the fourth industrial revolution.
There's going to be a lot of new ideas and fresh perspectives. So let's get cracking, shall we? When Jaap Haartsen introduced Bluetooth to the world, he did more than create a new wireless standard. He revolutionised the way we connect. With a background in electrical engineering and a passion for communication technologies.
Jaap's breakthrough in 1994 has enabled billions of devices to talk to each other seamlessly. So what might you not know? Bluetooth was initially named after a 10th century Scandinavian king who united Denmark and Norway. And Jaap's own vision for Uniting Devices has shaped the Internet of Things and continues to impact the tech we use every day. You can expect some fascinating insights for the man whose work literally lives in all of our pockets. It's an absolute privilege to be joined by the inventor of one of the most ubiquitous technologies that has changed the landscape for the Internet of Things.
He invented Bluetooth, welcome Jaap Haartsen! Hello. My pleasure. Hello. Thanks so much for joining me.
Thank you. So I've heard that you said invention starts with imagination. That's correct. What were you imagining in 1994 when you were thinking about making Bluetooth? Yeah, well, it started a little bit earlier, of course, than 1994, when I started with Bluetooth. But my knowledge about wireless became before that.
So I started at university already looking at wireless communications, and during my Ph.D work I was doing something with semiconductor physics, where I combined sound waves with electronics. Which sounds quite exotic but on the side I was doing some work for a very interesting company, which was called NCR, and maybe you've not heard of them, but NCR stands for National Cash Registers. And the company made systems for department stores, warehouses, etc. and they had these cash registers and when they had to remodel the stuff, the cash registers had to be somewhere else. And to have all those cables within the cash registers would be very cumbersome to change all the time.
So they wanted to have a wireless system. And actually there was a little department in Holland of NCR that was working on, what was called Wavelan. And I was making receivers, kind of components for the receiver for Wavelan and actually Wavelan later became WiFi. So I yeah, my initial work on communications was with WiFi. So when I graduated, I got my Ph.D., I went to the US, I started working with mobile phones.
I was learning all about mobile networks and cordless phones. And when I was about to go back to Europe from the United States, they asked me to work on home base stations, and home base stations were the fact that you use your mobile phone not in the cellular or cell as it used to be when you drive around and you have all those base stations. But when you got home, it was connected to your home base station, which was kind of a personal base station.
And that's where I learned about indoor communications. So combined with the WiFi knowledge I already had before, I combined that with the indoor communications with cell phones and well, I made a specification for that and it came into... I had the big specification handle, but actually that never came to something because the base station at home was not controlled by the operators and they didn't like that.
Today, you would call that phantom cells, very small cells in a very confined area. Anyway, my manager then asked, okay, can you make something that can connect to the phone with this accessories that was not there already? Because well, we had these, I was working with a cordless phones and mobile phones, but not with these short range connectivity and that's actually where Bluetooth started. So I was still working with my colleagues in the United States and there we call that Penny Link. And the idea was that we said, okay, an engineer, he wants to talk with his colleagues on the other side of the world and he's talking, but he wants to show something. And a picture says more than a thousand words.
So we have to scribble as well. So that's where the penny comes from, it's from the pencil, the stylus. So we had a Penny Link which connected to the phone, which circled and drew both data from this stylus stuff and your voice.
And that was the product we were working on when I moved to Sweden. We started to call it M.C. Link.
M.C. stands for Multi Communicator. The idea was that you had your phone and you had some kind of PDA kind of personal digital assistant at that moment, and you should have no cables in between that. So yeah, that should have been then also a wireless thing, and that's why we called it M.C. Link. And that was all inside the company I was working at, that was within Ericsson.
At a certain moment when we came to search and face that, well, specifications were ready, the technology was quite mature, the ideas were very stable. We thought we have to go out because, yeah, only Ericsson, he was making mobile phones. We need to create an ecosystem that can also connect to other devices from other manufacturers. So then we started to look around to who was going to join us and that we can come up together and create and a community, actually, to put this system on the market. And it was actually Intel who was the first one who understood the issue.
And they said, okay, let's call it a different name, let's call it Bluetooth. And that was because one of my colleagues, he was talking to an American guy about the history of Sweden and the Scandinavian world. And we had King Bluetooth here, a Viking king in 950 or something. And he made actually peace among the people in the in Sweden.
So instead of banging on their heads, they were talking with each other. So that's where the communication aspect comes from. Such a sweet sentiment that it was the king who made peace with other people, which I can see how it directly relates to Bluetooth and being able to connect with any device from any manufacturer.
Right. But didn't you originally want to call it something else, Piccolo? Well, the point was that Bluetooth was the project name. When we talked about products in our company, we always gave the name so that when you call colleagues from a cafe or a train, you were talking about something nobody else could understand what you were talking about. And Bluetooth was just a product name for this whole system.
So with Intel and other companies later on, Toshiba, IBM and Nokia, we call it Bluetooth as i n the product name. But then in 1999, we had to go to the market and then we said, okay, what are we going to use as a marketing name? A brand name? Well, then they thought, well, maybe we should use something like PEN personal era networking. But when you did Googled, then there was already Google then, you already got hits on PEN and on Bluetooth there were no hits.
So they said, okay, let's for the for the moment, call it Bluetooth. We will come up with a brand name later on. Let's launch it now. That was in May 1999. But the name stuck and it never changed. I'll say! It's hard to imagine a world before WiFi, which is what you were saying.
And I asked you about imagination. And it sounds like you are imagining a world where things could talk to each other that weren't connected. That's really kind of blue sky thinking, isn't it? Right. Especially as it was so long ago, you know, because we had to, like, put wires in the walls that connect to the Internet. What are all these things that you've bought me? I feel like we're going to go on a... Just to elaborate on that.
We had so many different standards as well. We had a lot of different cables with different connectors to it and nothing fitted with each other. But the Bluetooth, everything was gone because it was only Bluetooth.
But let me show you a few gadgets from when we launched the system. So first of all, I start with the phone. Of course, the phones did not have Bluetooth inside yet, not even WiFi.
So to be able to make this Bluetooth compatible, we had to use an adaptor. this adaptor was connected. I actually remember those! Yeah. It was connected to the system bus underneath the phone. And this one had Bluetooth in there.
It still big. Today, it's only little chip. But at that moment it was a little bit bigger. And that one could then be connected, for example, to a wireless headset.
This is the wireless headsets. And in 2000, it was actually made or designed in Holland. It kind of the original Brittany mic. Yeah.
So it's connected then to your phone. And if you want to connect with a PC, you use the PCMCIA card. How do you put that on the computer? There was a big hole in there. Today we don't have that.
Yeah, but we also had these kind of business cards for GSM later on for all the wireless. But that was it was in the beginning. So like in the year 2000 when we came up with the first product. And yeah, of course that has evolved quite a lot now.
Well, I was going to ask when you were putting your headset on and plugging in your extra Bluetooth connectivity and then putting the, you know, essentially some kind of sophisticated floppy drive thing in the computer. Did you ever imagine the impact that Bluetooth technology would have? You know, today we're seeing people with pacemakers relying on it and it's only kind of getting more and more relied upon, especially for the Internet of Things. Did you see this coming? No. No, not at all. Because actually, I'm a research guy, so I'm just interested in technology and solving problems and doing all kinds with technology.
So I was at Ericsson Research and this was a nice project. And I also know that if you're working in research, 99 of the 100 things you're working on never make it to the market. And of course, I like this idea but 1999 I could not envision that it would be this big and still for me it has gone over decades, of course, until now.
I started now in 1994, which is 30 years ago. So it was not a big change that in one moment I woke up and then there was Bluetooth everywhere, it went very viral. But the point was that at a certain moment and that was in 2006, I read somewhere an article on the Internet that says, okay, there are now 6 billion devices out in the world with Bluetooth inside them. And then I thought, okay, now that is a technology that won't go away anymore because it's still here. It was always that you have technology, it's being tried in the market and then it's moved out again.
But well, 6 billion devices out there that have Bluetooth, relying on it. Yeah. Then it's very difficult to imagine that that will ever go away. So then that was the moment for me, oh, this has become really big! I guess it's kind of like when a songwriter writes a song and then somebody listens to the song and takes a totally different meaning from it. And you just you kind of give away your child, and then people run away. What is the most surprising way that Bluetooth has been used that you've seen since you invented it? Wow.
Yeah. Well, the point is that there are so many different applications. But I think it was a very long time ago that somebody came up to me and said yeah, I'm working in the mine. And he said I wanted to use Bluetooth in the mines.
I thought, oh wow! What do they use it for in the mines? It was for communication between devices. Wow. And of course he could use it in the mines.
But yeah, you have these tunnels, etc. But later on, as I said, there are so many people have been imagining so many different ways of applying Bluetooth. That's just unbelievable. And the point was also, I'm don't work in the applications, I'm more in the technology itself. I could not predict how robust the system would be because we are all making use of the same spectrum, even WiFi, using that spectrum, a certain bend in the spectrum.
And if you load all those devices in the same spectrum, does it, at a certain moment, collapse? It's like you have a highway with all lanes and you put traffic on it. And yet the bigger the cars are, the bigger the trucks are. At the moment, you just have a traffic jam. That's the same with radio, actually.
And I was always... I did a lot of simulations with all kind of transmitters and receivers to see when the system went down. Because we said, well, it will be sufficient that if we have ten people here using Bluetooth independently from each other in the same room, that should be sufficient. But yeah, if millions of people are going to use it all over the world and they're coming together in a big audience room or something, will it not collapse? It didn't because it's a very robust system. Well, it didn't happen overnight, did it? Was it originally only stretched 11 yards? Is that right? Well, radio uses radio waves. And it depends on your environment, how far you come.
In this room, it will be very quickly blocked by the door, by the walls. If you are in a meadow, you can get to hundreds of metres. So yeah, it should cover a house and we have now also come up later versions where we have extended the range. But the idea was really that it should just be a bubble around you.
Short range communications. That was the headline. Is there any ways that it's going to be used in the future that you're particularly excited about? Yeah.
I'm working on things that have to do more in the medical domain. So, especially people that are getting older, that are in certain kind of homes where they move more slowly, etc. they have Parkinsons, dementia and Alzheimer.
And I'm working on systems where we help those people with, yeah, sensors on their body, sensors in their ear to make life easier. And also we know the health care is going through the roof with costs. So yeah we trying to take measures to counteract that. And that's an interesting area that I'm personally working on at the moment. Yeah.
The future of health care using Bluetooth must have been something you could never have imagined, though, in 1994. And what is the secret to inventing something? I read that you've had over 200 patents. Right. You said just now, like, often you're working on technology that never makes it to the market.
Right. What is it that gets the special ones over the line? Yeah. Inventing is not... It's hardly ever the eureka moment.
It's more like you're working on a challenge or a problem and you want to solve it, and you have to go through all the different ways of solving it, all the different routes. Because if you don't go through all of them, you might miss one of them. The point is, by inventing, okay, you come to a very good solution.
That's the best of out of them. And then of course, you have to think out of the box, because if it's already there, then it's not a patent worth either because you can't patent it. But it's a combination of all the things you imagine and the knowledge you have and all the the steps you have taken before about solving it in different ways, that you come up with the best way. Okay. And then you want to patent that, not because it's a great idea, of course you want to patent that as well, but because you want to protect it. that you can make money out of it.
That's what actually my patents are made for and to protect it that nobody else can get into your area. Because actually what we did with Bluetooth, it's called zero rents. That means that we did not require any licensing for people to pay to use Bluetooth. And that was very uncommon in that time because in mobile systems and similar systems, it was all based on patents and different companies were fighting each other and they had to pay licensing, cross licensing to each other. And for Bluetooth we said no, no licenses at all because we want to make it as low cost as possible.
But that does not mean that you don't need patents because you needed patents so that others would not create similar systems that would not be compatible with you and then would have a competing system in the market and then you're lost. So we had a patent pool, where we put in all our patents and we said, Well, you don't have to pay for it as long as you are adhering to the standards and you are developing it the way we have put it in the standard. Do you think the secret to success has been that it's free for people to implement? Yeah, I think so. It was one of the first open community, kind of, standards for everybody to use.
There's one small issue there that you did not have to pay for the specification, but of course the specification you can implement in many different ways. And if you implement it, yeah, then there might be patents on it with a certain company who was making it and he would be able to say, okay, you have to pay me for that implementation, but you did not have to pay for the specification. Because it was quite cool that you could really see it as sort of the first wave of open source electronics, right? Yeah.
And that was back in 1998 when we created the Bluetooth special interest group. Alongside, you know, Tim Berners-Lee with the Internet, giving it away. Right. It's just quite a lovely gesture, isn't it? Well, the point was also that we said it should not be a burden on the product that you put it in, so it should be low power so that it would not take much of the battery, but it also should be low cost. So that would not add much cost to the product.
And by creating licensing fees on top of it, that would increase the cost. So the idea was we should have a $5 radio in 1999 and I think we were close to that. And nowadays you can get below a dollar or something. What did Ericsson think when you proposed to give it away for free? Because did they not want to make money from it? No. Well, of course they want to make money from it, but not from the technology. They want to sell phones.
And the whole idea of Bluetooth for Ericsson was to create value to the phone. So buy an Ericsson phone, because then it has this value to connect to the other devices. But then Nokia came in and Motorola came in. So yeah, at a certain point there was not much offered and a leading advantage anymore. But of course the idea was phone technology and phone products, not the selling the technology, Bluetooth, itself. Well, I guess imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.
So, yeah, I'm sure there's a lot of engineers who are watching this, listening to this and feeling very inspired. What skills do you think are the most important to cultivate if someone out there is hoping to be the next inventor of the next Bluetooth technology? You have to be very open minded because you have to be able to think outside of the box. So you do a study, you get your knowledge and then - I don't say that's easy - but most of the people are extrapolating on things they know.
And yeah, the way of inventing, imaginating, is that you take the step out of the extrapolation of the things that naturally come from what you already know. So to have this open mind of fantasy that is something you need to have toinvent this and to come up with new ideas. But most of all, you have to start with the good, basic fundamental that you know what you're talking about. You know your .. I call it ingredients. How you build stuff.
And then yeah, It's like Lego, you're playing around with things and the ingredients are the same, but you come up with completely different things that you didn't do before. You set the world playing. Right.
And I know you've said that before. Do you believe that playing and to play is really important when it comes to being a good inventor? Yeah, I think so, because as I said, it's not one thing you're looking at and one solution. You're looking at different solutions and you're playing with it. You're looking at different angles from it. You're using that in different ways. And for me, that is a form of playing.
That's what I've always done in my life and that's also what makes it fun. Yeah, well, I guess is a thin line because on one hand you just want to play and experiment, but then on the other hand you need to be looking at the market and what they want. So have you ever found yourselves designing products for what the market want and it's not really working or, you know, to what point should engineers be considering that? And then to what point should the next generation of inventors just be sort of like being mad scientists? Yeah, I mean, well, as you said, that's a thin line because if you are too much bounded by the markets, then the market is also extrapolating, their seeing things.
"Okay, then I want this and this as well" so they don't make the jump. In the case of Bluetooth, I was not told by my manager all those restrictions on it like it has to be ready by that month or that year and it must be this market size, etc.. I was just left alone working in my area to work out thing and actually it's more of a phased approach that you start with this core playing kind of things and then it becomes, you know, it converts to do something. And then, yeah, that's also what we did. Then we went to look at the market.
Then we said, okay, now it's something which people will accept. How are we going to make that and put it on the market? How are we going to create this ecosystem? So if you start with this, it will never come to this core playing stuff. It sounds like your managers or bosses gave you the time to really play and develop and experiment. So would you say if you were giving advice to the next generation of business leaders who want to cultivate the next big technology, that they almost need a bit of a hands off approach when it comes to managing their electronical engineers? Yeah. Would you? Yeah, I would say that.
But there's also a good analogy with that. When you look at companies like Start-Up companies, they very much often come from spinoffs from big companies. Big companies cannot deal with this creative stuff that they just let people go.
So then, yeah, the spin off, that's the only way for them to get things done. So that's, for example, a big company in the Netherlands: ASML. Maybe you heard about them? They make all the lithographic stuff for chips. They were part of Philips, but Philips could not deal with that and there was a spinoff and well, now it's a multibillion company. But that's what I see what's happening.
You have this spin off. They are playing with things. They're trying it on the markets. You could have these Start-ups. These start-ups that are successful. It comes on the market, then they are acquired by a big company and then all innovation goes down again.
And then, well, you have some people within the company are doing something on the side. They create a spin off... Start-ups...
Putting something on the market. So yeah, that's the cycle you see with spinoffs, acquire acquisitions of big companies. But I was lucky that within Ericsson that my manager and the area I working in. He had the approach that he could have some of his people do some free work. And that came to first with my home base stations, but also with Bluetooth later on. Well, that's what I was going to say.
Do you think that was an anomaly? You know, the fact that you were working in a big company, but you had the time to be free,. Right. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. There's nothing that's an anomaly because that's not very, very often that you find that.
But I would say it's good advice. Yeah. And maybe for the next generation of engineers who are watching, sometimes I think it's easy to want to work at the big shiny companies that you know. But actually, sometimes the smaller stranger ones are where the more fun happens, right? Yeah. Very often. Yeah.
So you mentioned you've got a personal interest in the future of health care, especially when it comes to the older generations. Are there any other industries that you're really excited about integrating Bluetooth technology into? Well, as well, my own company, we are working with hearing protection devices so I can show you a little bit about that. So we are looking at a custom fit eartips. So you put them in your ear and they are...
Well, they are Bluetooth connected so you can make phone calls and you listen to music. And especially for people that are working in a very loud environment. You have to have protection. But with this one, you still can communicate and you can listen to music, etc.. So that's for one thing. But another area where I'm also working is to do with the energy transition we are working on nowadays.
That's an issue with global warming, etc.. And we are looking at alternative supplies. Energy supplies into your home. And the thing there is that actually you want to control your appliances, which you have in the home, we call them smart appliances, with the energy which is provided to you. So if you have a lot of solar energy at the moment, you want to connect it to certain appliances.
Whereas if another appliance, you know that, okay, it will take three hours for a washing run or something. And maybe clouds are coming. I would rather put that on the grid. So what I'm working on is these kind of systems where the appliances are communicating with a central hub in the house with their energy supplying equipment to control that, to balance the load. So what you have in the house with your appliances and the energy that is provided to you.
Wow. Do you think that Bluetooth can be instrumental in fighting the climate crisis then? Yeah, in the small ways it can, yes. Because the point is that Bluetooth actually is able to create more intelligence and smartness in your devices by communicating between the devices. And to make things more smart will help you give at least a certain power to help with the climate crisis. Wow. And I suppose when you were inventing Bluetooth in 1994 again, you never imagined that 30 years later you'd be helping a device to decide if it should take its power from solar or the other way around? Yeah.
I've heard that in your personal life, you actually don't use much technology. Is that true? Well, let me say it this way. There is a big difference between what I do in my private life and what I'm doing in my professional life. So indeed, when I am at home, I don't have all these gadgets around me that I'm completely relying on technology.
I actually, I want to be self-reliant so that I could exist without technology. Really? So, yeah, because if your battery runs out and you are in a certain place that people aren't, what do I do? I heard from people nowadays that they are on holiday and they are calling the emergency desk because they can't navigate anymore because the battery ran out of power. So do you think people rely on technology too much? I really think so, yes. That's quite a shocking statement from someone who invented one of the most powerful technology of that era. Really? So how do you stay self-reliant without any technology then? Well, how shall I say that? Of course I'm using the technology, but I'm trying not to be completely dependent on it.
So when I'm going on vacation. My preference would be to be in the wild. Just camping, Even without electricity. Wow.
And just with cooking your dinner on gas. And if people are relying on technology too much, how can we combat that and help people be less reliant on it? Well, at least you're thinking about alternatives because, well, we are living in a strange world. Suppose the electricity falls out now. All stop lights go down.
It will just be chaos. So that means that we are so much reliant on electricity and on this technology that our normal life cannot continue. I talked about traffic, but also with water provisioning, etc.. I think it scares me a little bit how much of that is controlled by technology and how we are dependent on this. And when you go camping and you're in the woods and you're doing your cooking, do you ever have visions for the future of the electronics industry? Like, what would you like to see happen? Well, of course, as I say, what I'm working on. Electronics, it's all around us.
It makes life easier. And what I see is that in the electronics industry nowadays, what we are pushing for are three things. Things have to be faster. Things have to be lower power and things have to be lower cost. So that means that they have to be smaller.
And that's always been the drive for electronic engineers to create their systems and their components. And I'm seeing it still happening. I don't know whether I've heard about the book The Singularity Is Near by Ray Kurzweil. Well, he says that, I think it's in 2030, that machines will be smarter than humans and they... well, I don't think they will take over the world.
But the point is, I don't believe that they will take over the world. But maybe what I'm scared of is that we lose, lose control over what we are doing and that there might be only a very few people that understand what's going on. Maybe in your own environment with with artificial intelligence. There's only a very small amount of people that know about what's going on and the rest of the people don't know.
And that big gap between the people that know and who don't know, that's getting bigger. Do you think that's likely to become reality? Yeah, I do. Really? Yeah.
Because now already there are few people who understand certain parts of the technology and the rest are just depending on it. The knowledge gap is something is something that we have to watch out for. That is right. Do you think quantum computing is going to play a role in this? Yeah, for sure. When I think of quantum computing, it's about cybersecurity because everything we do with our devices and what's also scary now with all the faking of personalities, etc., we always do authorisation, authentication.
So to know who you are talking with. Encryption - to encrypt everything so nobody can eavesdrop. To keep your privacy and keep your your data to yourself. And with quantum computing, actually see this being threatened because can we keep these kind of security levels and authentication levels, etc., even when the quantum computing is there?
Or do we have to come up with new technologies that will use quantum kind of technologies with crypto, etc. to counteract? Again, it's always this fight against counteracting and trying to break things. With quantum computing it is really about the security I'm quite worried about and thinking about how to solve that in our electronic devices. Yeah. So talking about new technologies, I imagine when you're working on Bluetooth, people must have thought it was quite weird.
Is there any kind of new technologies at the moment that seem strange that you predict are going to be big? Well. I don't think they are strange, but one of the things I'm thinking that has a great future is what I was saying about these electronics. We are working on the drivers, getting them faster, lower power and higher density. A big issue is that if you make smaller and smaller devices, you have issues with heat. You have to get rid of the the power they cause, that they dissipate. So heat is an issue nowadays.
And instead of using electrons to go through your circuits, use photons, that's what we call photonics. So instead of doing everything with normal transistors, with your electrons, etc., and your holes. Using photons, I think that has a big future because also the consumption is much less. It's very fast.
We have our fibre stuff in our homes, but yeah, using photonics to control that. So photonics is still at its... it's not mature yet I think.
But I think that is one of the areas I see that is coming and may take over the normal silicon, transistor circuits. Sounds exciting. So, you know, you mentioned that the reason Bluetooth was so successful was because it was essentially given away for free. And you said that you are scared of a world where some people know things and some people don't. Bluetooth has become a global technology.
How do you think, like, politics and economics might affect the next generation of global technology in the future? Yeah. Let me see. There are a number of issues that we are seeing. There is a lot of protectionism in the world nowadays, and I don't think that's good for open standards and for working together. So that's for one thing that I think. That trade policies, etc., keeping things to yourself.
That is not the way to innovate and to bring things to the world. Other things that are happening in the world, yeah, we are seeing conflicts in different parts of the world and that means that industries like defence industries are getting more and more attention now. And finally, with global warming, that is also in the things that are happening nowadays, That's a yeah...
We have to come up with new technologies to help fight this global warming issue. So when I'm looking at these different sectors that I would say that is important. Do you feel passionately that in the era of climate change that legislation should be used to make innovative technology open source? Well, legislation is a little bit hard word for that.
But I think we should strive so that it will benefit everybody, of course. But it's a global thing. And even the cost of the climate can be certain countries. But in the end, it's globally affecting us. So to help it get down, it should also be treated globally.
It's clear that you're really passionate about sustainability. How can the next generation of engineers contribute to a more sustainable and inclusive future through electronics? Yeah. So when you look at making products and designing products, I think, first of all, you already have to think about the end of life of a product. What does it mean when the product is not useful anymore? How much waste will it create? If you look at rare materials, but also dangerous materials like in batteries. So from the start, you already have to think about how you can recycle your product. And the other thing is that if you designed a product and you designed it with two components, how do you make sure that the overhead to get the product together is as small as possible? Because if you have to get components out of Asia and materials out of Africa, all things are going to be transported around the world five times before it gets into a sort of certain assembly line, maybe in Malaysia and then it's in big containers that move to the United States.
The transport of those will create a lot of pollution as well. So think about how you create products that can be maybe locally, put together with local components so that the transport between the different areas can be minimised. While Bluetooth is used in billions of devices, it does have a couple of competitors. Would you agree? How do you feel about the advent of Zigbee and WiFi and do you think it threatens Bluetooth at all? Well, first of all, I think they don't threaten, but I'll explain also why I think it is. As I told you, in the very beginning of doing my studies, I already had some exposure to WiFi. And actually, when we created the Bluetooth Sig in 1998, people from WiFi became very interested in what we are doing.
And the reason was that we're using the same spectrum, the resource where we use the radio as they were doing. So they saw it more as a threat, eating a little bit of their spectrum. And why shouldn't we use the Wi-Fi as well? Actually, they became part of the Bluetooth Sig, for example, Lucent, which came out of this NCR company that I was talking about and because Lucent was promoting WiFi , they thought, well, let's get into board of the Bluetooth Sig then at least we can control what's happening if they are also going to be using that spectrum.
And it was very much agreed upon that WiFi was application was to get rid of the cable of the Ethernet. So the only application of WiFi actually was to access the Internet. That was WiFi. And what you want to do then is to get it faster, faster, faster, faster. That's what WiFi has been doing with all their releases. Bluetooth had a lot of different applications, its audio, its voice, all censoring, etc.
And actually it's not only one application we're talking about and therefore we create these profiles that for each application you have a sort of profile where you optimise the system and the specification for the specific use case. But anyway, to be able we said, okay, we should be peaceful working together in the spectrum which we both use. And one of the things which was first worked on in, I think in 2000 or 1999 when we got the first release was to use adaptive frequency hopping.
And that means actually it's some kind of cognitive radio. And Bluetooth was looking in the radio spectrum. Where is WiFi and okay, I'm not going to sit on WiFi because then I'm going to disturb them.
So in that way, we already were working together a little bit so that Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were coordinated with each other, not directly, but by this cognitive radio in Bluetooth to avoid each other, so to say. And actually, that has been yeah, until now we have WiFi in the phone but also Bluetooth. We have systems that make sure that they are not going to transmit and receive at the same time, we call that packet traffic arbitration. So that's all done in the chips today.
The chips have both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi combined. So that's all, in a way, peaceful. I've always been approached by people who said, yeah, WiFi will in the end it will just over rule you and Bluetooth will go out and we had WiFi direct.
But in the end it never came. So WiFi the drive there was to get high speeds. And now the concern for lower lower data rates, a lower power consumption was not as big as in Bluetooth. So we always kept this advantage.
And that's why there are still Wi-Fi and Bluetooth in the phones. WiFi for accessing the Internet, Bluetooth for the short range connectivity around us. That's one thing. And then you mentioned another part that was a Zigbee. Zigbee has been around for quite a long time as well. It was mainly a proposition for the home automation.
You did the lighting control, etc.. And while the issue with the Zigbee was... Or the advantages with Bluetooth was... That it went into the phone and the growth which we have seen in the market of the phones which went from millions to billions of phones, that also helped to get Bluetooth in the markets. Zigbee did not have that advantage.
And what we have seen is that if you want to interact with your phone or with your laptop or whatever, with a Zigbee system, you always have to have the hub. And the relation between Zigbee and Bluetooth or Wi-Fi or whatever other standard you had. And that so far has been a big disadvantage, as I see. In the meantime, Bluetooth went to what we call Bluetooth low energy, which was a more variant, which was also yeah, I am targeting the applications of Zigbee with longer range sensors, lower power mesh networking and actually, yeah, that is existing now.
It's part of the Bluetooth standard. So I see it more and more that actually Bluetooth is moving away. The Zigbee implementations that will be more and more difficult for Zigbee to keep up the system in the markets because Bluetooth will also do it. Home automation, the office automation, etc.. Okay. It doesn't sound like you're worried then.
No. How do you feel about the advent of nanotechnology? Well, nanotechnology or nano layer. One example that's very close to my personal life is that my son is also doing physics and he's was working on the nano layers up into an atom thick. That means that he was looking at a lattice where electrons are moving and graphene, it's called. Where the intention is maybe that we can make transistors that are very fast because the electrons go to the lattice, they don't see the lattice anymore.
So they can move very fast and that makes them possible to make high, high frequency components. Yeah, for the rest, the nanotechnology itself is already a little bit of the past, I would say. Ten years ago, when I was at university, everywhere I wrote in Nano, it was possible to get the grants. But the nanotechnology layers we are using now for a coating, for example, to cover up our devices and the sensitive components. But as I said, it's for the ones where you go from 3D to 2D, I think you see there are big opportunities. What is the new words that when you write on applications you're guaranteed to get a grant? Artificial intelligence.
Of course, of course. Yeah. Now really, even what I'm working on now, even with the health care, by the way, that we are looking at sensors, we're getting data over there and we're trying to interpret these kind of sensor data and artificial intelligence in the new possibility of doing that. I'm not saying that it solves everything, but at least it's it's coming. And we have different applications nowadays that we are looking at for implementing this artificial intelligence. So that is the new code word that you have to put in your grants to get the money.
How do you think the relationship between artificial intelligence and electronics is going to evolve? Well, I see artificial intelligence is a post processing, so it runs on electronics. And the point is that, yeah, it depends on how you implement it. So artificial intelligence, depending on what applications you're looking at, maybe needs movements of notes that may be difficult to get in a small ear piece which I put in my head. If you can then creates what we call neural processing devices, that you can actually reduce your amount of notes and optimise it in such a way that you optimise it for the specific application, that is the new ways of getting artificial intelligence into devices with limited power consumption and limited to processing capabilities. Is exciting, isn't it? Sometimes I wish I was back at uni now, in the age of AI, because there's so many different ways you can use it to learn.
Do you think it's an exciting time to be an electronic engineer in the age of AI and can you see it kind of helping the process? Yeah. As I said, to study electronics and electrical engineering. It has so many different ways you can look at it. As you said, it's artificial intelligence. It's about a signal processing, about software. But you can also go to the other way.
You can go into materials and you can look at antennas, you can look at electronic circuitry. So there are yeah... I always see it in three levels. You have the materials, the circuits, and then you have the systems. And in all those three areas, it's yeah... there's so many things you can do.
And the one thing is for sure that it moves so quickly. So you have to keep learning, you're teaching yourself, learning the new things because every ten years the world has completely changed within electronics. And finally, what are you most excited about in the future, whether it's electronic based or camping in the woods? Well, I'm... As I as you said, I'm not relying on the electronics in my personal life. But I think it's great to work on electronics.
And I still think that we will exponentially grow and see new things with electronics also in the near future. And well, we are now getting close to where Moore's Law is ending, that every 18 months we have an increase by a factor of two. But still there are other ways that still we are so innovative that we get new stuff.
And electronics. It's just I think it's the best profession you can choose anyway. Okay. Well, thank you so much for some incredible insights from a true pioneer of our future.
It was my pleasure.
2024-12-06 18:02
