CMP's Communications Design Conference will admit qualified applicants free of charge to its sessions this year; the result has been a record number of advance registrations. The show, sponsored by this magazine, CommsDesign.com and EE Times, will be held Sept. 30 to Oct. 2 at the San Jose (Calif.) Convention Center. Despite three tough years in communications, the show has grown in both attendance and program quality. It features more than 150 technical papers, tutorials and workshops dealing with topics ranging from wireless LAN-cellular integration and the analysis of applications processors to metro access, and from advanced computing platforms to quality-of-ser-vice within core and access networks.
Setting the show's tone is keynote speaker Eric Mentzer, vice president and chief technology officer of Intel's communications group. Mentzer comes to CDC after appearing at the spring Optical Fibers in Communications Conference in Atlanta, where he gave a fascinating speech in which he compared the trucking industry to open modular communication standards. He may not be driving a big rig for his keynote at 5 p.m. on Sept. 30, but his take on standards is sure to be provocative.
The special industry panels at CDC will be a particular draw the following two afternoons. On Wednesday, Oct. 1, Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.), will lead a discussion on wireless industry trends, querying a panel that includes Atheros chief executive Craig Barratt, long-time industry pundit Andy Seybold and Texas Instruments technical staff specialist Carl Panasik, as well as key vice presidents from Motorola's Radio Products Division, Analog Devices' RF and Wireless Group and Philips Semiconductors' business communications group.
On Oct. 2, Infonetics Research senior analyst Michael Howard will discuss Ethernet's role in metropolitan transport, along with experts such as Hatteras Networks vice president Kevin Sheehan, Gigabit Ethernet pioneer Jonathan Thatcher and Ample Communications vice president of marketing Marek Tlalka.
In-depth tutorial sessions will be interspersed throughout the three primary days of the conference on such subjects as DSP for communications, Internet Protocol mobility, next-generation architectures using the advanced telecommunications for computing architecture and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing. A full-day tutorial on Oct. 1 will cover RF techniques, and a similar full-day tutorial on Oct. 2 will cover TCP/IP.
Workshops and paper sessions will be grouped into five regular tracks this year, with a special emphasis on wireless. The tracks are: wireless 2.5/3G, wireless PAN/LAN, core networking, metro/access and Enterprise/SAN.
Two half-sized tracks, titled "Home Networking and Embedded Communications," also will feature a mix of workshops and paper sessions. In addition, John Metz of Metz International will host a special network processing track sponsored in conjunction with the Network Processing Forum.
Wireless focus
The two wireless tracks will feature an especially rich mix, addressing issues such as standards, software-defined radio, multimedia processors, ultrawideband, smart antennas, WLAN-cellular integration and advanced RF design. The core networking track will also address standards, as well as the future of IPv6, modular communication architectures and advanced optical circuits. The in-depth metro/access and home networking tracks will update attendees on all aspects of DSL, cable and last-mile access, as well as software for residential gateways and 802.11 over coax.
Meanwhile, the enterprise and embedded track will discuss such issues as TCP offload engines, ATCA concepts and serial interconnects, as well as memory architectures and 10-Gbit Over Copper.
As in past conferences, the Wednesday evening (Oct. 1) sessions will conclude with free-form "birds of a feather" sessions on topics including ultrawideband signaling.
Editor's Notes: To attend the Communications Design Conference, visit www.CommDesignConference.com.. To catch breaking news from the show and the communications industry at large, visit www.CommsDesign.com.
