April 18, 2005
Technology in Focus features analysis of recent technology news articles, by the consultants in Technology Group, IDA. This is the top pick of the month from a list of 10 - 20 news analysis compiled monthly.
UWB Standards War Splits to Three Contenders
by Yeap Yean Wei, Associate Consultant, Network Technologies
It is more than three years from the date the Federal Communication Commissions (FCC) announced the permission of unlicensed use of Ultra-Wideband (UWB) devices. Things in the UWB space are progressing both slowly and quickly at the same time. Slow describes the lack of motion toward finalizing and adopting an IEEE standard for the short-range high-speed wireless technology, despite multiple votes in the past meetings. Fast describes the development work and product plan from various parties instead of waiting for arrival of the standard. For instances, Freescales UWB chipset (XS110) are FCC approved and commercially available; Samsung demonstrated the first UWB-enabled cell phone using XS110 at 3GSM World Congress; Wisair, Pulse-Link and G.I.T. (Japan) are commercializing respective UWB chipset.
Over the years, the MultiBand OFDM Alliance (MBOA), backed by Texas Instruments and Intel, and a group that champions direct-sequence UWB (DS-UWB), led by Motorola are engaged in a stalemate over standards for high-rate UWB communications. While the two existing UWB proposals struggle to rival a standard under IEEE 802.15.3a, a new contender, Pulse-Link, is delivering the third proposal, a more WLAN-like capability that the company calls CWave UWB (Continuous Wave UWB). To promote the technology, the company plans to woo independent services provider to form the C-Wave Alliance (Consumer Wireless Audio-Video Entertainment Alliance) before a standards meeting in late March 2005. It is really a bad news for MBOA and DS-UWB camps that have been rivalling for nearly two years.
The addition proposal from Pulse-Link not only adds more rain clouds to an already stormy UWB environment; its wireless capabilities are also competing with the existing Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). If the company is accurate in its pitch, the new UWB approach will deliver 2Gbps up to 2 meters and 1 Mbps out to 100 m. That is a nice pipe size, especially when trying to move multimedia content between devices. Hence, the company's platform is targeted at supporting multimedia and High Definition TV (HDTV) data streams at WLAN ranges. Under the current approved parameters of the FCC, the table below shows Pulse-Link's CWave UWB capability of demonstrating significantly higher data rates as compared to the existing WLAN 802.11a/b/g.
The CWave UWB architecture is different from Multiband-OFDM and pulse-based DS-UWB architectures. According to Pulse-Link, the CWave UWB signal is derived from a continuous waveform frequency carrier with phase shifting introduced to produce RF emissions, which subsequently filtered to meet the FCC spectral mask. The credit for such technology is the proprietary forward error correction technology (variable spreading codes) that yield extremely high data rates at short range, and can be used to increase signal gain by more than 25dB (300 times better) for longer transmission ranges at lower data rates.
Nevertheless, the emergence of CWave UWB technology might further delay the UWB standard adoption, but it will ultimately heap more excitements and betterments to the consumer products.
Some words about the writer
Yeap Yean Wei is an associate consultant with the Technology Group, tasked with the responsibility of identifying and driving the adoption of emerging wireless telecommunication technologies in Singapore. He specializes in a wide range of wireless and radio frequency technologies, including ultra-wideband (UWB), fixed and mobile broadband wireless access.
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