To a large extent the future of consumer electronics affects us all. Not just in what equipment we buy for our home, car, RV or boat but also in the way that other things spin out from the consumer electronics market. We used to say that the monies spent on research on space were repaid by the improvements/changes in other technologies that resulted from that knowhow. Now I believe it is consumer electronics that drive many other developments.

After spending some days at the year 2000 IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) in Los Angeles (June 13 - 15) I am convinced all over again that this section of the industry is one of the smartest that there is. And this conference just keeps getting better and better, with the quality of the papers improving quite dramatically over the last few years. And that is the result of competition between proposals being made for selection; the poorest papers, indeed, now tend to be the ones that are specifically solicited for the conference. "TV Anytime" and "Broadband Access" were sessions that probably should not have happened.

I had been hoping to hear new views on the 8-VSB/COFDM debate for DTV terrestrial broadcasting but was doomed to disappointment in the hope that there would be staggering breakthroughs. As we are almost certainly stuck with 8-VSB, with any other view being regarded by the FCC as an attempt to delay implementation of DTV, it would be nice to see some real solutions evolve. Only two relevant papers were presented and they seemed to miss the mark.

One was from Matsushita who described a VSB demodulator LSI with a waveform equalizer. The intent was to reduce long ghosts created by multipath by adding larger numbers of taps to the equalizer and by changing the coefficients with faster updates. Still too academic for me with the concern of reducing the area of silicon needed for these upgrades (estimated at 7 times) by spreading the calculations in the equalizer and by using a non-uniform filter architecture.

The second paper was presented by speakers from three different universities in Korea. They described a functionally-spaced decision feedback equalizer with what they are calling a "stop-and-go" algorithm that they say makes for "robust indoor reception" for 8-VSB terrestrial DTV. The team explained, without any proof unfortunately, that large symbol timing offsets can be generated by multipath in an indoor environment but that they cannot be corrected by large symbol timing offsets in any kind of conventional DFE.

These two academic but unproven approaches do not fill me with confidence for the future of DTV reception in multipath situations. Even research produced at the conference by the Brazilian equivalent of the FCC left me in some awe about the assumptions made to justify its conclusions in favor of 8-VSB. Maybe I'm getting jaundiced about whether money is not influencing too many engineering decisions these days.

The "2000 Digest of Technical Papers" for the ICCE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (June 13-15, 2000) is available as IEEE catalog number 00CH37102. (Publication Sales, IEEE Operations Center, 445 Hoes Lane, PO Box 1331, Piscataway, NJ 08855-1331, Tel: 800-678-4333)

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