Technology challenges in the development of wireless personal area networks

Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) will be major components of the heterogeneous communication environment of the future. The devices in a WPAN must be low cost and operate for a long time from a battery. As a consequence, they pose demanding requirements on the utilized integration technology. In this paper we confront these requirements with the newly released international technology roadmap for semiconductors (ITRS-2001). Power consumption is identified as the key problem, motivating a large research effort in low power design techniques. In addition, it is pointed out that WPAN devices will consist of different technologies, requiring a better design support for mixed-technology integration.