Hi all,

I am about to design a product which will be in use for at least 10
years and needs a medium range (about 50cm max) free-space optical
data link, low speed (under 9600 bps is fine - even 1200 bps would be
acceptable). The product contains both sides of the link so it does
not have to communicate with standard products. It needs to be robust
to a fair amount of dust (up to a 1cm layer of paper dust) and be able
to work in normal ambient room light (i.e., not outdoors).

I prototyped a solution using a microcontroller, IR LED, and IR
phototransistor and FSK modulation which seems to work well although I
have not tested it yet under all of the relevant conditions (e.g.
dust).

However, a co-worker of mine pointed out that it would be nice to use
an off-the-shelf IRDA module, which would have the side benefit of
allowing this optical interface to be used also as a debugging port
for the product, since IRDA would be easily capable of much higher
data rates.

I am a bit concerned about designing in IRDA, though, since I do not
see it commonly used anymore in consumer devices. I wonder if it is
going obsolete and may be difficult to source components for it in,
say, 3 or 5 years from now. I searched the web and haven't found
anything definite about the future of IRDA - wikipedia seems to
indicate that its popularity is being revived by something called
"irSimple" which seems to be a variant of IRDA. Also, I found articles
which indicate that it is still widely used in consumer products in
Japan. I found that Digikey and Mouser both seem to have plenty of
stock of IRDA offerings from several manufacturers.

What is your opinion? Is IRDA going to be around for at least 5 more
years or is it disappearing quickly?

Thanks,

Sean
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