Is the Great UWB Wait over? printer friendly articles
9 Jan 2007
arcchart.com
Photo: images.belkin.com
Belkin has finally done it! It has indeed launched its much promised wireless USB hub, making it one of the earliest commercially available UWB product. Lest you forget, UWB has been around for almost seven years, without any tangible product on the market. However, this quite remarkable gestation period has been anything but boring. National regulators have done their bit in prolonging the wait for UWB, but even they would humbly step aside and pass the title of show-stoppers to the largest industry players. Freescale and the WiMedia alliance have fought fiercely over the choice of technologies to be adopted. Freescale supported direct sequence UWB while a rival group supported the multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) flavour. The endgame is that WiMedia UWB, promoted by Freescale’s rivals, has been selected by the Bluetooth SIG and the USB Implementers Forum as the foundation radio for their high-speed wireless specifications. Freescale left the forum last April to concentrate its UWB efforts on its own version of wireless USB 2.0, called Cable-Free USB.
Let us pause and look at what we missed because of this tangle. UWB, with its primary vehicle wireless USB, can offer data rates up to a maximum of 480 Mbps over a distance of 30 m. UWB transmits information spread over a large width of radio spectrum (>500 MHz), generating radio energy at specific time instants. Had it not been for the above conflict, the USB-UWB combo should have written the obituary for Bluetooth and significantly dented the Wi-Fi market by now, not just because of UWB’s higher data rate, but also because of the huge power efficiency of wireless USB (10 times more efficient than Wi-Fi and 50 to 70 times more efficient than Bluetooth).
Now for the good news. While UWB received the thumbs-up from the FCC two years ago, the technology finally got the go-ahead from the European Commission's Radio Spectrum Committee last December: the committee granting a positive regulatory opinion, thereby paving the way for its adoption in the EU, as early as February 2007. The approval has not been unanimous though, with France and some Scandinavian countries opposing it, although it is believed that the resolution was able to garner the required 70% member approval “comfortably”. If the approvals from Ofcom, the FCC and TELEC (the Japanese regulatory authority) are anything to go by, UWB will operate between 3.1-10.6GHz in the US, 6-10GHz in the UK and 7-10GHz in Japan. Hopefully, this disparity in bands will not disrupt the global harmonization of UWB-based products.
With the release of Belkin’s hub, the Great UWB Wait appears to have now ended and wireless USB products (based on UWB) such as PCs, cameras and mobile phones are expected to hit the market this year, using a dongle attachment to send and receive wireless USB data. Wireless USB is a short-range, high-bandwidth wireless version of USB and is based on the WiMedia Alliance's UWB. Wireless USB employs Micro-scheduled Management Command (MMC) for Wireless USB hub discovery, intention notification, power management and data transmission scheduling. To enable easy migration from wired USB, the wireless USB specification is defined in terms of high speed host-to-host connection.
Belkin’s cable-free four-port USB Hub enables PCs up to 30 feet away to access storage, printers, cameras and other stationary USB devices connected to the hub and comes with a USB-based UWB dongle for communication between the PC and the hub. The Belkin hub is priced at USD 200 and runs on a UWB chipset from Wisair. Belkin resorted to Wisair after its original silicon partner, Freescale, pulled out of the game. Last November, Wisair also partnered with Y-E Data in Japan for production of a similar four-port UWB hub, named YD-300.
Intel, a major participant in WiMedia, has unveiled its Wireless UWB Link 1480 media access controller (MAC) silicon, a host solution targeted at third party physical (PHY) layer chips. Developed in partnership with Alereon, the 1480 supports concurrent IP streaming via both the WiMedia Network (WiNET) standard and certified Wireless USB traffic. Additionally, the 1480 dynamically splits the traffic between IP and Wireless USB in any proportion. It is for the IP capabilities that the Link 1480 is also used in the Belkin wireless USB hub.
In September this year, Tzero Technologies and Analog Devices announced that they would be creating standards-based wireless High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) solutions for HDTVs, DVD players, set-top boxes and game systems with the same QoS as that of wired connections. Gafen has launched an HDMI extender based on this solution. The extender, costing $499, works out to be extremely cost effective when compared to costs and complexities of wired counterparts.
And then there is the ultimate in convergence, UWB on the mobile phone (without the dongle)! Staccato Communications is working with SK Telecom to employ UWB on handsets, transforming the phone into a virtual computing platform. This is to be expected of SK Telecom, who has always pioneered the enrichment of mobile phone applications such as Location Based Services by integrating GPS into the phone. Staccato has already branded this new phenomenon as Personal Area Social Network (PASN), and has enunciated probable use-cases for the technology: handset-to-PC networking using wireless USB for file synchronization, printing and backing up data, or employing a larger display such as a PC monitor or as a TV to manage mobile phone functions. Handset-to-hub communications will emulate the Wi-Fi hotspots, providing wireless internet access to phones in specific coverage areas.More importantly, handset-to-handset communication, enabling richer personal interaction, will be the key attraction for mobile phone UWB. These phones are expected to role out in 2007, and will support Certified Wireless USB as well as WiMedia Network (WiNET) protocol adaptation layer for interoperability with other TCP/IP services.
So the UWB Great Wait is over. Devices will trickle onto the market over the course of this year, initially leveraging USB dongles to provide connectivity, followed by full integration within PCs, peripherals and consumer electronics devices: mirroring the rollout pattern observed during the early days of Bluetooth and then Wi-Fi. While both these technologies today enjoy wide penetration, Bluetooth achieved this at a snails pace, while Wi-Fi grabbed the market almost overnight. It remains to be seen whether UWB will rollout in baby-steps or with a bang!
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