Startup touts home network that can deliver video
By Junko Yoshida
EL DORADO HILLS, Calif. — Aiming to catapult over the competition in
the nascent market for home networks, a two-year-old startup is about to
sample a handful of ASICs that could make it possible to send a multimedia
camel through a networking pipe the size of a needle's eye.
ShareWave Inc. is peddling the vision of a 4-Mbit/second RF network
operating in the 2.4-GHz ISM band that handles digital TV as well as data.
As other players and industry alliances gear up to deliver first-generation
chips for 1-Mbit/s data-grade home nets that run over phone lines, power
lines or wireless links, ShareWave is claiming that the five ASICs it will offer
PC and consumer system makers this month can do much more. Indeed, by
using its proprietary codec capable of a 36:1 compression ratio for
sustained video, ShareWave says it can squeeze an effective 120-Mbit/s
video stream down a 4-Mbit/s pipe, making it possible to transmit
full-motion video across its home network. The cost should be less than
$100 per node, the company said. Both ShareWave and its competitors
expect to see a system product launch in 1999.
ShareWave will announce this
week that a bevy of
top-drawer backers, including
Ameritech, Cisco Systems,
Intel and Philips, recently
ponied up a total of $25 million
for the startup. Microsoft
Corp. is also an investor.
Meanwhile, EE Times has
learned details about
ShareWave's ASICs, which
are being fabbed by VLSI
Technology Inc. and LSI Logic Corp. in a 0.35-micron process. Samples
are ready now; volume production is to start later this year. ShareWave will
sell silicon and license its proprietary compression and wireless-networking
technology.
The still-unproven market for home networks is already becoming crowded.
In mid-August, Intel Corp. became the third company (after Advanced
Micro Devices and Rockwell Semiconductor) to announce it will provide an
Ethernet controller that handles 1-Mbit/s networking over home phone lines
based on the draft specification of the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance
(HomePNA). That solution uses technology licensed from Tut Systems
(Pleasant Hill, Calif.).
Meanwhile, Intellon Corp. (Ocala, Fla.) last week said that Microsoft has
become the first licensee of its high-speed networking technology, which
offers 1 Mbit/s over existing power lines.
What sets ShareWave apart is a patent-pending, bandwidth-adaptive,
wavelet-based compression algorithm. Vice president of engineering Amar
Ghori claims this technology, as applied in the Network Adaptive
Multimedia Image (NAMI) codec, fundamentally improves the quality of
compression to the point where the original and compressed images are
"almost indistinguishable."
Besides the NAMI codec, ShareWave has designed four other ASICs: a
pair of low-cost and low-power NAMI compression and decompression
ICs for embedded applications; and two types of wireless network
controllers, each integrated with the ARM7 core. All are ready to sample .
ShareWave will be in the business of licensing its technology and reference
design, while selling its own silicon. Predicting that the future of home
networking will be a "heterogeneous" one, where both wired and wireless
networks are likely to coexist, ShareWave will offer licenses covering its
entire wireless networking scheme or separate components of it that may
apply to wired or wireless solutions.
When applying ShareWave technology to PCs, for example, the startup will
provide a PCI-based reference-design board integrated with its full wavelet
codec, radio chip and wireless network-controller ASIC. But for mobile
embedded systems that are mainly used to download Internet data or audio
streams, OEMs may only need to incorporate a lightweight NAMI decoder
chip.
ShareWave combines its wavelet-based codec with proprietary
wireless-network-management protocols, together with a proprietary
modulation scheme and direct-sequence spread-spectrum technology. "The
current 4-Mbit raw-data throughput is enough for our home network to
handle a single real-time video stream, shared by other interactive data
among multiple data clients," said James Schraith, president and chief
executive officer of ShareWave. The technology could "galvanize multimedia
sharing across the home," said Ghori.
Spec discussions
By contrast, most of the RF, phone-line, power-line or infrared-based
home-networking solutions now being developed remain focused on such
applications as low-bit-rate file, printer or modem sharing among PCs or
peripherals within a home. Specifications are currently being discussed in a
variety of industry organizations, including the Home RF Working Group,
HomePNA and the Infrared Data Association (IrDA).
ShareWave, in fact, is a member of the HomeRF consortium, along with
some 40 other companies including Compaq, Ericsson, Hewlett-Packard,
Intel, Microsoft, Sony and Matsushita. The group is developing technologies
based on hybrid 802.11 wireless LAN and Digital European Cordless
Telephony (DECT) standards. It plans to complete its spec by the end of
the year, with an eye toward product rollouts in 1999. The group is looking
at a wireless data throughput that is typically only 1 or 2 Mbits/s.
ShareWave's technologies clearly depart from this spec, for better or
worse. "Championing a technology that is not included in emerging
[specifications] could be a threat," said Van Baker, director of consumer
market research at Dataquest Inc. (San Jose, Calif.). On the other hand,
"Being late to market in the face of emerging technology alternatives would
be [another] risk."
Chief executive officer Schraith said, however, that ShareWave would "like
to influence the future HomeRF spec." The consortium recently formed a
subcommittee to consider wireless multimedia applications, an area where a
component of ShareWave's technology might fit. The chairman of the
HomeRF group was not available last week for comment.
The full NAMI codec is based on about 500,000 gates, while the separate
NAMI compression and decompression chips come in at 200,000 and
250,000 gates respectively, with a power consumption of about 1 W.
The NAMI codec is designed to handle both synthetic data and
high-bit-rate, real-time full-motion video, with its latency kept as low as 30
milliseconds. The wavelet-based algorithm is suitable for packet-switched
network applications, according to Ghori. He said the device offers
bit-budget exact response, as well as on-the-fly adjustment in accordance
with the available bandwidth, which dynamically changes depending on the
condition of the home network.
The result is to allow a real-time relocation of bit budget for reduced
quantization errors and motion components, Ghori said. The codec also
eliminates wringing artifacts commonly seen in wavelet-based compression.
The NAMI compressor is applied as soon as data — such as
MPEG-2-based full-motion digital video — is descrambled and
decompressed within a set-top box. The goal is to make the uncompressed
stream fit into a 4-Mbit raw-data throughput, so that digital video
entertainment received in a satellite set-top downstairs in a living room, for
example, can be viewed on a bedroom television upstairs, without stringing
a wire. ShareWave is also applying its own copy-protection scheme when
compressing the stream, according to Ghori.
ShareWave clearly sees its technology playing a complementary role to
IEEE 1394-based home networks. To maintain interoperability with other
home-entertainment devices connected over the 1394 serial interface,
ShareWave is evaluating the applicability of HAVi (Home Audio-Video
interoperability) protocols as its physical layer, Ghori said. Designed by
eight consumer-electronics companies including Sony, Matsushita and
Philips, HAVi allows various digital consumer appliances to connect and
interact in an IEEE 1394-based network, with or without the presence of a
PC at home.
"While HAVi is expected to be prevalent within a home entertainment
theater, we fully expect our solution to coexist, as we offer a convenience of
being wireless," said Schraith.
The NAMI codec integrates a video scaler and flicker filters so that data,
received in a computer, can become viewable when transmitted to an
interlaced NTSC TV screen. Yet unlike some of the home-networking
schemes now being developed, ShareWave's solution is hardly PC-centric.
"Our technology is agnostic. It's applicable not only to a host PC, but also
to a residential gateway, cable modem or advanced set-tops," said Bob
Bennett, co-founder and vice president of marketing at ShareWave. "Our
solution doesn't even rely on Windows for network management," added
Schraith.
Currently, every cable operator, phone company, PC maker and
consumer-electronics manufacturer is jockeying to offer some kind of a
residential gateway product or home server that connects the home with the
outside world while also linking different devices within a home. In this
atmosphere, a multimedia home-networking technology with a broader
bandwidth capability could have a significant impact.
ShareWave believes its solution could be highly applicable to the upcoming
OpenCable specifications being hammered out by the cable industry.
Features such as allowing users to make Internet Protocol phone calls from
anywhere in the home; access Internet data received on a PC cable modem
from a living room; watch entertainment programs received in a cable
set-top in a living room from a TV located elsewhere in the house are all
potentially useful applications for the OpenCable spec. Bennett, however,
declined to comment on how his company may be participating in that
initiative.
But if the most popular home-networking applications turn out to be things
like file sharing, or modem and Internet sharing off a host PC, ShareWave
could get hammered by the competition. "For most of those applications,
1-Mbit bandwidth is really more than enough," said Dan Sweeney, business
unit manager for Intel's home networking operations. And for such
low-bit-rate applications, plenty of diversified home networking solutions
based on power line, phone line and RF are ready to roll out in 1999 — at
just about the same time as ShareWave solutions.
Because the prospects are so unsettled, few corporations are putting all
their eggs in one basket. ShareWave, for example, attracted some
top-drawer corporate investors, along with an array of venture-capital
companies.
Many of those corporate investors see home networking as an important
catalyst, pivotal to creating a demand for their own services or products.
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