Soon, everything from your washing machine to your wristwatch will be connected to the Internet. Or so the pundits of future technology would have you believe. I, for one, have little need for a refrigerator that keeps track of my groceries and places an order based on what I need from the store (the exception, of course, being necessary beverages) but many applications can benefit (reasonably) from Internet connectivity. That's why folks are working on making enabling technologies smaller: so they can be squeezed into the places you need them. For products that need to get connected, Texas Instruments and PCTEL are now offering a minuscule V.90 embedded modem chipset. TI says the two-chip solution cuts power consumption by as much as 90 percent and board space by up to 40 percent over existing solutions. The chipset consists of a TMS320C54V90 DSP and PCTEL line-powered Data Access Arrangement (DAA). It consumes only 25 mW of power when running a V.90 modem and requires as little as 1.5 square inches of board space. The DSP uses PCTEL's modem control and data pump software, eliminating the need for off-chip memory, and puts the digital portion of the DAA on-chip. The PCTEL line-powered DAA is used to interface to the telephone line and is compatible with local phone access in more than 65 countries. TI and PCTEL also plan to release a V.92 embedded modem chipset that will offer more symmetric data transmission speeds with higher upload bandwidth, faster handshaking time to achieve modem connection, and a modem on hold feature that allows the modem connection to be sustained when a phone call comes in on the same line. Samples of the C54V90 chipset are available today, with production scheduled to begin in Q4 of 01. No word yet on that modem for your fridge.