Wi-Fi's biggest fan

摘要

Dennis Eaton, chairman of the Wi-Fi Alliance, once dreamed of being a veterinarian. But his dream withered during a few days of college fieldwork with a vet. "I decided I needed a nice, clean desk job," says Eaton, who then turned his undergraduate attention to the art of radio frequency engineering. That must be his true calling after all ―nearly 18 years later, he's still fiddling around with those radio waves. After receiving a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University in 1984, Eaton began working on radio frequency ― mostly for classified government projects ― at Harris Semiconductor. Most recently, he's worked on 802.11b radio chipsets at fabless semiconductor maker Globespan Virata. "RF engineering is pretty complex stuff," Eaton says. "The tools today let you get in the ballpark [of solving a problem]. But beyond that, it's a lot of intuition and experience." That blend of science and art, of technology and intuition, has served this 41-year-old well during his tenure with the Wi-Fi Alliance. The Alliance, founded in 1999, exists to test and certify interoperability of IEEE 802.11-based wireless LAN (WLAN), or Wi-Fi, prod-ucts.Today it comprises more than 205 member companies.