Telecom engineers and researchers face several challenges when it comes to testing their 5G and 6G prototypes. One is finding a testbed where they can run experiments with their new hardware and software.

The experimentation platforms, which resemble real-world conditions, can be pricey. Some have a time limit. Others may be used only by specific companies or for testing certain technologies.

The new IEEE 5G/6G Innovation Testbed has eliminated many of those barriers. Built by IEEE, the platform is for those who want to try out their 5G enhancements, run trials of future 6G functions, or test updates for converged networks. Users may test and retest as many times as they want at no additional cost.

Telecom operators can use the new virtual testbed, as can application developers, researchers, educators, and vendors from any industry.

“The IEEE 5G/6G Innovation Testbed creates an environment where industry can break new ground and work together to develop the next generation of technology innovations,” says Anwer Al-Dulaimi, cochair of the IEEE 5G/6G Innovation Testbed working group. Al-Dulaimi, an IEEE senior member, is a senior strategy manager of connectivity and Industry 4.0 for Veltris, in Toronto.

The testbed was launched this year with support from AT&T, Exfo, Eurecom, Veltris, VMWare, and Tech Mahindra.

The subscription-based testbed is available only to organizations. Customers receive their own private, secure session of the testing platform in the cloud along with the ability to add new users.

A variety of architectures and experiments

The platform eliminates the need for customers to travel to a location and connect to physical hardware, Al-Dulaimi says. That’s because its digital hub is based in the cloud, allowing companies, research facilities, and organizations to access it. The testbed allows customers to upload their own software components for testing.

“IEEE 5G/6G Innovation Testbed provides a unique platform for the service providers, and various vertical industries—including defense, homeland security, agriculture, and automotive—to experiment various use cases that can take advantage of advanced 5G technologies like ultra low latency, machine-to-machine type communications and massive broadband to help solve their pain points,” says IEEE Fellow Ashutosh Dutta, who is a cochair of the working group. Dutta works as chief 5G strategist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, in Laurel, Md. He also heads the university’s Doctor of Engineering program.

“The IEEE 5G/6G Innovation Testbed creates an environment where industry can break new ground and work together to develop the next generation of technology innovations.”

The collaborative, secure, cloud-based platform also can emulate a 5G end-to-end network within the 3rd Generation Partnership Program (3GPP), which defines cellular communications standards.

“Companies can use the platform for testing, but they can also use the environment as a virtual hands-on showcase of new products, services, and network functions,” Dutta says.

In addition to the cloud-based end-to-end environment, the testbed supports other architectures including multiaccess edge computing for reduced latency, physical layer testing via 5G access points and phones installed at IEEE, and Open RAN (radio access network) environments where wireless radio functionality is disaggregated to allow for better flexibility in mixing hardware and software components.

A variety of experiments can be conducted, Al-Dulaimi says, including:

• Voice and video call emulation.
• Authentication and encryption impact evaluation across different 5G platforms.
• Network slicing.
• Denial-of-service attacks and interoperability and overload incidents.
• Verifying the functionality, compatibility, and interoperability of products.
• Assessing conformity of networks, components, and products.

The testbed group plans to release a new graphical user interface soon, as well as a test orchestration tool that contains hundreds of plug-and-play test cases to help customers quickly determine if their prototypes are working as intended across a variety of standards and scenarios. In addition to basic “sanity testing,” it includes tools to measure a proposed product’s real-time performance.

The proofs of concept—lessons learned from experiments—will help advance existing standards and create new ones, Dutta says, and they will expedite the deployment of 5G and 6G technologies.

The IEEE 5G/6G testbed is an asset that can be used by the academics, researchers, and R&D labs, he says, to help “close the gap between theory and practice. Students across the world can take advantage of this testbed to get hands-on experience as part of their course curriculum.”

Partnership with major telecom companies

The IEEE 5G/6G Innovation Testbed recently joined the Acceleration of Compatibility and Commercialization for Open RAN Deployments project. A public-private consortium, ACCORD includes AT&T, Verizon, Virginia Tech and the University of Texas at Dallas. The group is funded by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration, whose programs and policymaking efforts focus on expanding broadband Internet access and adoption throughout the country.

“The 3GPP-compliant end-to-end 5G network is built with a suite of open-source modules, allowing companies to customize the network architecture and tailor their testbed environment according to their needs,” Al-Dulaimi says.

The testbed was made possible with a grant from the IEEE New Initiatives Committee, which funds potential IEEE services, products, and other creations that could significantly benefit members, the public, customers, or the technical community.

Watch this short demonstration of how the IEEE 5G/6G Innovation Testbed works. youtube

By all accounts, Andrea J. Goldsmith is successful. The wireless communications pioneer is Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. She has launched two prosperous startups. She has had a long career in academia, is a science advisor to the U.S. president, and sits on the boards of several major companies. So it’s surprising to learn that she almost dropped out in her first year of the engineering program at the University of California, Berkeley.

“By the end of my first year, I really thought I didn’t belong in engineering, because I wasn’t doing well, and nobody thought I should be there,” acknowledges the IEEE Fellow. “During the summer break, I dusted myself off, cut down my hours from full time to part time at my job, and decided I wasn’t going to let anybody but me decide whether I should be an engineer or not.”

Andrea J. Goldsmith

Employer

Princeton

Title

Dean of engineering and applied sciences

Member Grade

Fellow

Alma Mater

University of California, Berkeley

Major Recognitions

2024 IEEE Mulligan Education Medal

2024 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee

2020 Marconi Prize

2018 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award

Royal Academy of Engineering International Fellow

National Academy of Engineering Member

She kept that promise and earned a bachelor’s in engineering mathematics, then master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. She went on to teach engineering at Stanford for more than 20 years. Her development of foundational mathematical approaches for increasing the capacity, speed, and range of wireless systems—which is what her two startups are based on—have earned her financial rewards and several recognitions including the Marconi Prize, IEEE awards for communications technology, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

But for all the honors Goldsmith has received, the one she says she cherishes most is the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal. She received this year’s Mulligan award “for educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications.” The award is sponsored by MathWorks, Pearson Education, and the IEEE Life Members Fund.

“The greatest joy of being a professor is the young people who we work with—particularly my graduate students and postdocs. I believe all my success as an academic is due to them,” she says. “They are the ones who came with the ideas, and had the passion, grit, resilience, and creativity to partner with me in creating my entire research portfolio.

“Mentoring young people means mentoring all of them, not just their professional dimensions,” she says. “To be recognized in the citation that I’ve inspired, mentored, and educated generations of students fills my heart with joy.”

The importance of mentors

Growing up in Los Angeles, Goldsmith was interested in European politics and history as well as culture and languages. In her senior year of high school, she decided to withdraw to travel around Europe, and she earned a high school equivalency diploma.

Because she excelled in math and science in high school, her father—a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley—suggested she consider majoring in engineering. When she returned to the states, she took her father’s advice and enrolled in UC Berkeley’s engineering program. She didn’t have all the prerequisites, so she had to take some basic math and physics courses. She also took classes in languages and philosophy.

In addition to being a full-time student, Goldsmith worked a full-time job as a waitress to pay her own way through college because, she says, “I didn’t want my dad to influence what I was going to study because he was paying for it.”

Her grades suffered from the stress of juggling school and work. In addition, being one of the few female students in the program, she says, she encountered a lot of implicit and explicit bias by her professors and classmates. Her sense of belonging also suffered, because there were no female faculty members and few women teaching assistants in the engineering program.

“I don’t believe that engineering as a profession can achieve its full potential or can solve the wicked challenges facing society with technology if we don’t have diverse people who can contribute to those solutions.”

“There was an attitude that if the women weren’t doing great then they should pick another major. Whereas if the guys weren’t doing great, that was fine,” she says. “It’s a societal message that if you don’t see women or diverse people in your program, you think ‘maybe it isn’t for me, maybe I don’t belong here.’ That’s reinforced by the implicit bias of the faculty and your peers.”

This and her poor grades led her to consider dropping out of the engineering major. But during her sophomore year, she began to turn things around. She focused on the basics courses, learned better study habits, and cut back the hours at her job.

“I realized that I could be an engineering major if that’s what I wanted. That was a big revelation,” she says. Plus, she admits, her political science classes were becoming boring compared with her engineering courses. She decided that anything she could do with a political science degree she could do with an engineering degree, but not vice versa, so she stuck with engineering.

She credits two mentors for encouraging her to stay in the program. One was Elizabeth J. Strouse, Goldsmith’s linear algebra teaching assistant and the first woman she met at the school who was pursuing a STEM career. She became Goldsmith’s role model and friend. Strouse is now a math professor at the Institut de Matheématique at the University of Bordeaux, in France.

The other was her undergraduate advisor, Aram J. Thomasian. The professor of statistics and electrical engineering advised Goldsmith to apply her mathematical knowledge to either communications or information theory.

“Thomasian absolutely pegged an area that inspired me and also had really exciting practical applications,” she says. “That goes to show how early mentors can really make a difference in steering young people in the right direction.”

After graduating in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering mathematics, Goldsmith spent a few years working in industry before returning to get her graduate degrees. She began her long academic career in 1994 as an assistant professor of engineering at Caltech. She joined Stanford’s electrical engineering faculty in 1999 and left for Princeton in 2020.

Commercializing adaptive wireless communications

While at Stanford, Goldsmith conducted groundbreaking research in wireless communications. She is credited with discovering adaptive modulation techniques, which allow network designers to align the speed at which data is sent with the speed a wireless channel can support while network conditions and channel quality fluctuate. Her techniques led to a reduction of network disruptions, laid the foundation for Internet of Things applications, and enabled faster Wi-Fi speeds. She has been granted 38 U.S. patents for her work.

To commercialize her research, she helped found Quantenna Communications, in San Jose, Calif., in 2005 and served as its CTO. The startup’s technology enabled video to be distributed in the home over Wi-Fi at data rates of 600 megabits per second. The company went public in 2016 and was acquired by ON Semiconductor in 2019.

IEEE: Where Luminaries Meet

Goldsmith joined IEEE while a grad student at UC Berkeley because that was the only way she could get access to its journals, she says. Another benefit of being a member was the opportunity to network—which she discovered from attending her first conference, IEEE Globecom, in San Diego.

“It was remarkable to me that as a graduate student and a nobody, I was meeting people whose work I had read,” she says. “I was just so in awe of what they had accomplished, and they were interested in my work as well.

“It was very clear to me that being part of IEEE would allow me to interact with the luminaries in my field,” she says.

That early view of IEEE has panned out well for her career, she says. She has published more than 150 papers, which are available to read in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Goldsmith has held several leadership positions. She is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society and the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Information Theory.

She volunteers, she says, because “I feel I should give back to a community that has supported and helped me with my own professional aspirations.

“I feel particularly obligated to create the environment that will help the next generation as well. Investing my time as a volunteer has had such a big payoff in the impact we collectively have had on the profession.”

In 2010, she helped found another communications company, Plume Design, in Palo Alto, Calif., where she also was CTO. Plume was first to develop adaptive Wi-Fi, a technology that uses machine learning to understand how your home’s bandwidth needs change during the day and adjusts to meet them.

With both Quantenna and Plume, she could have left Stanford to become their long-term CTO, but decided not to because, she says, “I just love the research mission of universities in advancing the frontiers of knowledge and the broader service mission of universities to make the world a better place.

“My heart is so much in the university; I can’t imagine ever leaving academia.”

The importance of diversity in engineering

Goldsmith has been an active IEEE volunteer for many years. One of her most important accomplishments, she says, was launching the IEEE Board of Directors Diversity and Inclusion Committee, which she chairs.

“We put in place a lot of programs and initiatives that mattered to a lot of people and that have literally changed the face of the IEEE,” she says.

Even though several organizations and universities have recently disbanded their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, DEI is important, she says.

“As a society, we need to ensure that every person can achieve their full potential,” she says. “And as a profession, whether it’s engineering, law, medicine, or government, you need diverse ideas, perspectives, and experiences to thrive.

“My work to enhance diversity and inclusion in the engineering profession has really been about excellence,” she says. “I don’t believe that engineering as a profession can achieve its full potential or can solve the wicked challenges facing society with technology if we don’t have diverse people who can contribute to those solutions.”

She points out that she came into engineering with a diverse set of perspectives she gained from being a woman and traveling through Europe as a student.

“If we have a very narrow definition of what excellence is or what merit is, we’re going to leave out a lot of very capable, strong people who can bring different ideas, out-of-box thinking, and other dimensions of excellence to the roles,” she says. “And that hurts our overarching goals.

“When I think back to my first year of college, when DEI didn’t exist, I almost left the program,” she adds. “That would have been really sad for me, and maybe for the profession too if I wasn’t in engineering.”

Attention nowadays has turned to the energy consumption of systems that run on electricity. At the moment, the discussion is focused on electricity consumption in data centers: if this continues to rise at its current rate, it will account for a significant proportion of global electricity consumption in the future. Yet there are other, less visible electricity consumers whose power needs are also constantly growing. One example is mobile communications, where ongoing expansion – especially with the new current 5G standard and the future 6G standard – is pushing up the number of base stations required. This, too, will drive up electricity demand, as the latter increases linearly with the number of stations; at least, if the demand per base station is not reduced. Another example is electronics for the management of household appliances and in the industrial sector: more and more such systems are being installed, and their electronics are becoming significantly more powerful. They are not currently optimized for power consumption, but rather for performance.

This state of affairs simply cannot continue into the future for two reasons: first, the price of electricity will continue to rise worldwide; and second, many companies are committed to becoming carbon neutral. Their desire for carbon neutrality in turn makes electricity yet more expensive and restricts the overall quantity much more severely. As a result, there will be a significant demand for efficient electronics in the coming years, particularly as regards electricity consumption.

This development is already evident today, especially in power electronics, where the use of new semiconductor materials such as GaN or SiC has made it possible to reduce power consumption. A key driver for the development and introduction of such new materials was the electric car market, as reduced losses in the electronics leads directly to increased vehicle range. In the future, these materials will also find their way into other areas; for instance, they are already beginning to establish themselves in voltage transformers in various industries. However, this shift requires more factories and more suppliers for production, and further work also needs to be carried out to develop appropriate circuit concepts for these technologies.

In addition to the use of new materials, other concepts to reduce energy consumption are needed. The data center sector will require increasingly better-adapted circuits – ones that have been developed for a specific task, and as a result can perform this task much more efficiently than universal processors. This involves striking the optimum balance between universal architectures, such as microprocessors and graphics cards, and highly specialized architectures that are suitable for only one use case. Some products will also fall between these two extremes. The increased energy efficiency is then “purchased” through the effort and expense of developing exceptionally specially adapted architectures. It’s important to note that the more specialized an adapted architecture is, the smaller the market for it. That means the only way such architectures will be economically viable is if they can be developed efficiently. This calls for new approaches to derive these architectures directly from high-level hardware/software optimization, without the additional implementation steps that are still necessary today. In sum, the only way to make this approach possible is by using novel concepts and tools to generate circuits directly from a high-level description.

The post Efficient Electronics appeared first on Semiconductor Engineering.

Connected vehicles offer a range of benefits, such as real-time data sharing, app-to-car connectivity, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and critical safety features like location tracking, remote parking, and in-vehicle infotainment systems (IVIs). These advancements aim to enhance the overall driving and riding experience. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that equipping vehicles with smart features also exposes them to potential cyberattacks. These attacks can result in customer data leakage or even compromise critical safety functionalities.

It’s expected to discover vulnerabilities after the product is released, which could have been easily prevented. For instance, as reported by Bloomberg, a recent increase in car thefts was attributed to the absence of anti-theft computer chips in vehicle critical systems. Therefore, it is imperative to proactively consider and address potential attack vectors right from the initial stages of development. This cybersecurity vulnerability applies to many other industrial applications, such as industrial IoT, SmartCity, and digital healthcare, where every device or system is connected, and every connection is a vulnerability.

Design for security is becoming mainstream and should be part of today’s standard design methodologies.

What you will learn:

1. Why a model-based and system-oriented solution is needed for automotive cybersecurity

2. How to quickly identify threat scenarios

3. Why a pre-silicon security verification flow is essential for secure ICs

4. Using AI to mitigate side-channel vulnerabilities

Who should attend this presentation:

This webinar is valuable to anyone who works with product design, connectivity and security.

Register now for this free webinar!

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Back when scientific publications came in paper form, libraries played a key role in ensuring that knowledge didn't disappear. Copies went out to so many libraries that any failure—a publisher going bankrupt, a library getting closed—wouldn't put us at risk of losing information. But, as with anything else, scientific content has gone digital, which has changed what's involved with preservation.

Organizations have devised systems that should provide options for preserving digital material. But, according to a recently published survey, lots of digital documents aren't consistently showing up in the archives that are meant to preserve it. And that puts us at risk of losing academic research—including science paid for with taxpayer money.

Tracking down references

The work was done by Martin Eve, a developer at Crossref. That's the organization that organizes the DOI system, which provides a permanent pointer toward digital documents, including almost every scientific publication. If updates are done properly, a DOI will always resolve to a document, even if that document gets shifted to a new URL.

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Join us for an insightful webinar on high-speed data acquisition in the context of Distributed Fiber Optic Sensing (DFOS) and learn more about the critical role that high-performance digitizers play in maximizing the potential of DFOS across diverse applications. The webinar is co-hosted by Professor Aldo Minardo, University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli, who will speak about his phi-OTDR DAS system based on Teledyne SP Device’s 14-bit ADQ7DC digitizer.

Register now for this free webinar!