If Your Toaster Had a Brain
Echelon pushes chips for everything from trains to beer taps.
-by Art Kleiner
Back in 1983, when A. C. (Mike) Markkula was Apple's chairman, he and Steve
Jobs recruited John Sculley to head the company. Markkula volunteered to
educate the new chief executive about the industry, and drew a chart
showing how every time the price of computers dropped 10 percent, sales
multiplied tenfold.
Personal computer prices were approaching $1,000, and 10 times as many
personal computers were selling as when workstations had cost $10,000.
"That's interesting," Sculley said. "But what happens when they hit $10?"
Markkula said he didn't know. "There'll probably be some clever invention
that will make somebody a lot of money."
Today, Markkula is trying to make his own prophecy come true, through a new
company called Echelon. Based in Palo Alto, Calif., Echelon makes what it
calls "neuron chips" - actually board-like modules about the size of index
cards, comprised of three microprocessors each. Each board is one small
component of giant computers that will, should Markkula's vision turn real,
surround us someday.
"If you put 1,000 intelligent, distributed nodes inside a building, and you
add up all their computing power and memory," Markkula said, "you end up
living inside the equivalent of a very powerful central computer. But it
would be impossible for a single computer to do as many things at once as
this network could do."
Echelon actually represents the third stage in Markkula's career. A dapper
man in his 50s who slightly resembles Jimmy Carter, he became a millionaire
marketing chips for Fairchild and Intel in the 1970s. After retiring in his
mid-30s, he was known in Silicon Valley as "the third Steve," the man who
bankrolled Jobs and Steve Wozniak to help found Apple (and who, among other
things, persuaded Wozniak that floppy disks were worth using).
In the mid-1980s, while trying to wire his house for a "smart" lighting and
entertainment system, Markkula remembered his remark to Sculley about the
market-reach of $10 computers. Commanding devices around the home had been
a longstanding dream, but the results always turned out half-baked and
cumbersome. A digital machine couldn't easily manipulate the analog knob of
a toaster or TV.
But if you attached a $10 digital controller to that appliance, Markkula
reasoned, and made it as programmable and customizable as a personal
computer, the difficulties might evaporate - especially if the chips could
cue each other over power lines, radio waves, telephone wire, or infrared
beams. He called the chips "neurons" - not after neural networks, which
they vaguely resemble, but after the independently active, inter-related
neurons of the human brain.
This year, products containing the chips are just beginning to appear
commercially. Their implications go far beyond merely automating homes.
Echelon's tools, in fact, may never automate many toasters, but they could
reshape industrial society.
"Among the makers of microcontrollers, Echelon has the broadest potential
influence," said David Mason, who follows the future of information
technology at Northeast Consulting Resources in Boston. "They have a
completely organized view of their chips as not just an isolated device,
but a brand name for an idea of fitting them together. A house is just one
example. People might happily buy into one use for the chips, and that will
be a Trojan Horse for the whole Echelon system."
A demonstration of the neuron-chip system begins, in fact, with Trojan
Horse-like simplicity. You twirl an ordinary dimmer switch, and a light
bulb, mounted nearby on the same panel, brightens and dims. Then you reach
beneath the dimmer switch and tap a small button. Now, when you turn the
dial, two lamps brighten and dim. With more taps, you add another switch to
the circuit; now both switches adjust the same lamp's brightness. Then you
rip the second switch off the wall (to which it is attached with Velcro),
and move it three feet to the left. It still dims the bulb, sending its
commands over a radio link. Wouldn't it be nice, you think, to be able to
move around and reprogram all my own light switches this easily?
"If you think about how dimmer switches work," said the Echelon engineer
who guided me through the demo, "you realize you couldn't do this in an
ordinary house." Two dimmers, wired in sequence to add resistance to the
wire, can't operate one bulb; if the first switch squeezed the current to a
trickle, how could the second release a torrent?
Echelon's system accomplishes the feat by attaching the dimmer (a resistor
circuit) inside the lamp, with a neuron chip controlling it. The light
switch merely sends a signal through the power line, telling the lamp's
neuron chip how much to brighten or dim. The lamp, like every appliance in
an Echelon system, is programmed to recognize its own eight-bit binary
code; when a transmission carrying its address passes by, it snags the
instruction and responds.
Echelon doesn't make the lamps or switches. It provides the infrastructure
which connects them. It sells boards (with chips made by Toshiba and
Motorola) to makers of appliances and other "smart" hardware. Developers
also buy the kits for programming the chips (by attaching them to an IBM PC
or clone), and the network interfaces, which link them across the
developer's choice of power lines, radio waves, telephone wire, or infrared
beams.
Notwithstanding industry skepticism, Echelon has managed to line up some of
the largest consumer and building companies as customers, including AT&T,
Honeywell, and the Swiss contracting giant Schlumberger. Like Apple,
Echelon sends out "evangelists" to third-party developers to entice them
into building with its chips (which cost $10 now, and are supposed to drop
to $2 by 1995 - not much to add to the price of a crockpot or alarm
system).
But where Apple sought out freewheeling software designers, Echelon must
cultivate a much more staid group: lighting manufacturers, security
companies, and consumer electronics firms. Many demur because the home
appliance industry has its own rival system, called CEBus (for "Consumer
Electronics Bus"). Like MS-DOS in Apple's early days, CEBus doesn't quite
match the power or inventiveness of the California upstart, but it has the
blessing of the establishment. The CEBus also has a big plus - the ability
to carry video images - and a big minus - it doesn't quite exist yet.
Because of the CEBus competition, Echelon is more likely to appear first in
industrial circles. Locomotives and factory assembly lines, for instance,
can have their massive (and expensive) electrical cable harnesses replaced
with a single loop of wire exchanging messages between neuron chips
connected to hundreds of devices within the machine. Eventually, autos
might be built around Echelon systems; drivers could reconfigure their
dashboards when the mood struck, as if they were setting new preferences in
their computer software. ("I'd like my mileage in kilometers today - or how
about in leagues?")
Markkula, who owns a cattle ranch, talks about strapping neuron chips to
his cows' hooves to check their weights from afar, or find a particular
calf by triangulating a signal to a homing device. Small children, he
muses, might carry similar chips to help their parents find them in a
crowd. Echelon's chief executive officer, Ken Oshman (formerly of the Rolm
telephone system company), talks of sensors on a race car that instantly
download performance data into diagnostic computers as it rolls into a pit
stop.
All sorts of innovations seem dazzlingly possible - light rail, smart
factories, and ultimately homes as charming and responsive as those in Toon
Town, in which everything you touch, from the doorbell to the commode, can
have a customizable personality.
Today, prototype neuron chips exist in Amtrak trains, shuffling the
destination signs when cars are recoupled. In a Florida parking lot, they
prompt lights to lead people as they walk to their cars. The French
government is installing an Echelon system for apartment buildings; it can
convert messages from Minitel (a French online system) to voice-mail and
read them through a speaker in the wall.
But the most commercially successful system so far is probably the
liquor-dispensing apparatus in a casino in Loughlin, Nevada. Rows of
bottles sit behind the bar, pointed downwards with tubes coming out of
them. When the bartender rings up a sale, one chip calculates the change,
another updates the inventory list, and a third controls the flow of liquor
into the glass. Why the investment? To keep bartenders from pouring
extra-heavy drinks.
If Echelon's world follows that pattern, it will be pitiless to rule-
benders - thousands of chips implanted in everything from fireplugs to
mailboxes could keep tabs on the people around them. Like many
technologies, Echelon's systems will have to find a way to guarantee the
privacy of people who use them. They will also have to safeguard against
intrusion - which they now accomplish with randomly generated
authentication codes and passwords, much like the PIN codes of credit
cards. As Markkula said, "You don't want anybody to be able to turn on your
garbage disposal while your arm is in there."
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