Name: Connectivity Isn’t One Size Fits All: The Tradeoffs Engineers Should Consider in Industrial Networks
Uploaded: 2026-04-08T15:42:28.608Z
Duration: 17 min 8 s
Description: Connectivity Isn’t One Size Fits All: The Tradeoffs Engineers Should Consider in Industrial Networks

Transcript for "Connectivity Isn’t One Size Fits All: The Tradeoffs Engineers Should Consider in Industrial Networks": Welcome back to the next session. It's about connectivity. But connectivity isn't one size fits all. The trade offs engineers should consider in industrial networks. The speaker of the next session is, Ayd Alsabach. He's senior director product marketing of Skyworks. Selecting connectivity in a factory automation requires weighing critical trade offs. This is session highlights how latency, efficiency, bandwidth, coverage, and interference impact machine vision data flow, coordinated motion, and overall system performance. The presenter, Ed, is, senior director of product marketing for RF and mixed signal intelligence at Skyworks, and he has more than 20 in semiconductors and wireless industries communications experience. So I pass over to Ayd now. Hi everyone, and thanks for joining today's session at the Arrow Factory Automation Summit. I am Ed Alsaba, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Skyworks, and I'll be walking you through the key connectivity trade offs every smart engineer should consider in their next industrial automation design. Now I know twenty minutes is a short time to cover all of wireless technology, but don't worry. I promise to keep it informative, digestible, and only slightly nerdy. Let's dive in. Automation is transforming everything. We're living in a world where automation is transforming industries, communities, and even our daily routines. From machine vision to mobile robots, from augmented reality to industrial wearables, intelligence is being pushed everywhere, and connectivity, for that reason, is the central nervous system that makes it all work. But as we all know, these use cases emphasize different connectivity needs. Say a machine vision camera streaming high definition video has different needs compared to, say, a vibration sensor on a motor. A mobile robot needs different performance than a smart meter. Our job and yours is figuring out which connectivity standard fits which job. Connectivity enables intelligence. In factory automation, everything revolves around data, collecting it, analyzing it, and acting on it. That makes connectivity a foundational building block in industrial systems. And just like the different use cases we discussed have different data demands, the takeaway here is that also wireless connectivity is not a one size fits all. Some deliver long range connections, while others support high bandwidth. And for battery operation systems, connectivity is designed to sip power like they're enjoying a very expensive cocktail. Understanding these trade offs lets us map the right technology to the right use case. Rate versus range. Let's talk about that classic rate versus range trade off. Every key wireless standard lives somewhere on this chart. Wi Fi and five gs excel in bandwidth, which makes it ideal for content distribution. Bluetooth and Thread serve short range, low power devices, while useful in sense and control applications. LoRa and Wyson, on the other hand, stretch across long distances with small packets. These sub GHz protocols deliver strong value in industrial environments and in smart city applications. This variety helps us build a robust ecosystem where every device, from industrial wearables, handheld devices, to wide area infrastructure, each one of them playing its part. What do customers really value? If there's one word customers bring up more than any other, it's reliability. Customers want predictable range, low power consumption, and resilience in noisy RF environments, which means seamless coexistence when multiple radios operate in the same footprint. While most standards get developed in ideal lab environments, all connectivity solutions are expected to tackle real world scenarios and deliver benefits that are way beyond just academic design. At Skyworks, we enable these reliable connections with our front end modules and filtering technologies by boosting linearity, filtering noise, improving thermal performance, and enabling longer battery life. Whether it's machine vision or a mobile robot, better RF performance always translates directly to better user experience and lower operating cost. Building a reliable network begins with a deployed infrastructure. And most smart factories today are heterogeneous wireless environments in that regard. So you might see a private five gs network for its secure mobile systems, sub GHz LoRaWAN for facility wide infrastructure, Wi Fi for localized high capacity zones, Or Bluetooth for device level interactions GNSS, another technology for navigation driven and asset tracking systems Often, all these standards operate side by side, which is why flexible, protocol optimized RF solutions are critical. Skyworks in that regard delivers a comprehensive portfolio of protocol optimized RF solutions. At Skyworks, we design and manufacture RF power amplifiers, LNAs, switches, filters, and front end modules that operate seamlessly across all of the wireless standards: GNSS, Bluetooth, SubGHz, Cellular, Wi Fi. Each are optimized for the specific sensitivity, linearity requirements, power, or bandwidth of that protocol. These technologies ensure quality of service across industrial use cases and in real world scenarios, even in dense RF environments common in factory settings. Now, we will walk through each of the key connectivity options, highlighting its key attributes, critical design considerations, and the optimized solutions to use in that use case. Let's start with GNSS connectivity. GNSS stands for Global Navigation Satellite Systems. As more autonomous systems operate indoors and outdoors think robots, drones, automated vehicles GNSS becomes a critical layer of positioning. GPS operates across multiple bands and multiple satellite constellations in mid orbit. That means 20,000 kilometers from Earth, trying to establish accuracy within three meters. So you can imagine, due to the signal strength coming from all that distance, GNSS receiver performance can degrade quickly in the presence of industrial interferences, such as like band 13 in The US. And to achieve accuracy needed, low noise figures is a key parameter for receiver sensitivity. GPS solutions. So to achieve all of that, Skyworks filtering and LNA technology gives these systems the resilience they need for precision positioning. Skyworks provides multi band L1, L5 RF receiver modules. Multiband translates to better tracking. Keep that in mind. Multiband, better tracking. Low noise amplification, sub-1dB noise figure, improve receiver sensitivity. Integrated filters block out out of band interferers. Overall, that contributes to improved tracking, accuracy, and reliability of the signal. Now moving into cellular four gs and five gs, it remains essential for industrial IoT, requiring licensed spectrum, low latency, and high reliability. Whether a system uses private five gs on the factory floor or connects through wide area macro cellular network, The key considerations are the following: Supporting multi operator license spectrum Optimizing for small cell private deployments versus macro deployments Developing platforms that reduce global SKUs and time to market To achieve these goals, Skyworks' four gs and five gs RF solutions support all of these attributes, from multi band, multi operator, high efficiency power amplifiers, and RF discretes that allow for flexible implementation. These wideband products provide the needed flexibility to reduce the number of SKUs globally. This summary snapshot provides a complete lineup overview. The overall lineup features reliable signals over wide temperatures from -forty to 105 degrees Celsius, or transmit powers that are high efficiency, high power, wide bandwidth, receiver technology that is low insertion loss with exceptional linearity. All of that while reducing time to market with multi band single board designs with all of these pin to pin parts. And lastly, proven designs with partner digital predistortion systems. Moving to sub GHz connectivity with LoRaWAN and Wi SUN ecosystems. For long range low power industrial sensing, sub GHz technologies like LoRaWAN and Wi SUN truly excel. These are ideal for smart meters, utility infrastructure, asset tracking, distributed sensor networks. Within all these sub GHz protocols, LoRa implements a star network architecture, while Wi SUN networks evolved really to support distributed mesh networks. Lastly, under the 802.11 standard, Halo emerged as a sub gigahertz technology implementation that supports high throughput use cases. In all of these sub gigahertz implementations, Skyworks FEMs offer some of the highest efficiency on the market. And with that, stretching battery life and enabling deployment systems that last years without service. Because no one wants to crawl down the basement, tear through the spider webs to swap a battery, not even the person whose job it technically is. These solutions also are SoC and protocol agnostic. They provide the flexibility and the future proof necessary for these deployments. Bluetooth connectivity. Bluetooth continues to expand into industrial IoT. It continues to add new features like channel sounding, low energy transfer, and enhanced data rate to support a growing ecosystem of wearables, asset tags, diagnostics, proximity detection, and much more. These devices really need the long battery life as well, and also as importantly, a robust coexistence with 2.4 GHz Wi Fi system. Skyworks in that regard offers leading power consumption, almost reaching 40% power added efficiency in the latest generation, which could roughly double the battery life compared to, say, using an SoC alone to amplify the signal. That family has up to 22 dBm of output power for extended range, low noise LNAs for stronger uplink performance. And similar to what we've done in the other bands, our 2.4 GHz solutions portfolio support multiprotocol, including ZigBee and 802.15.4. They are also SoC agnostic to provide the necessary flexibility in implementation. Bringing in the rear is Wi Fi connectivity. For bandwidth heavy applications like video, machine vision, analytics, Wi Fi truly shines. In these environments, it's important to ensure that the dense Wi Fi networks stay fast even at the edge of coverage. Access points for that reason should target FCC allowed powers to maximize that coverage, defaulting to the latest standard in implementation. So Wi Fi seven supports the highest throughput and capacity. And also, you need chipset reference designs that can reduce your time to market with these implementations. So Skyworks Wi Fi FMs, they deliver the necessary performance. High power levels allowed by FCC. High throughput supported by the standard, including ten twenty four QAM and three twenty MHz bandwidth. And last but not least, supporting the leading chipsets from Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek. To bring it all together, what's really the big picture here? Industrial automation requires multiple wireless ecosystems operating simultaneously. There is no silver bullet here. Instead, building robust, future proof systems means selecting the right standard for each task and ensuring each radio performs at its best. On our side at Skyworks, we help achieve that through best in class efficiency, high linearity and receiver immunity. We also work hard to make our designs thermally optimized, and we deliver them through a deep, comprehensive, multi standard portfolio of RF solutions. In fact, our portfolio is so deep that even our engineers sometimes need a map. But don't worry, that's why we built all these block diagrams for you. So as factories continue transforming into intelligent, connected systems, reliable wireless connectivity becomes really the foundation enabling that automation through efficiency and through innovation. Thank you all for your time today. I hope this gives you a clear picture of how Skyworks Technologies are powering the next wave of industrial automation designs, from the smallest sensors to the widest network. I'm happy to take any questions or deep dive into any of these topics of interest. Thank you.