On June 12 US chip designer Tzero launched its new UltraWideBand chip which offered communication both over wireless links and over co-ax, and while we immediately thought, isn’t that what Pulse~link did a couple of years ago, Pulse~link reached straight for its lawyers.
The legal action was announced this week and promises to kick off a legal battle over intellectual property right across UWB, a whole cluster of technologies that deal with wireless in a totally different way.
The genuine complaint at Pulse~link is that it is not being left alone to plow its own furrow, after having its technology ignored by the WiMedia Alliance, a collection of companies that now claim to speak for UWB technology led by Intel and Texas Instruments. Tzero is in this camp, but Pulse~link says that unlike the other companies that fly under the WiMedia Alliance banner, Tzero is trying to invade its space of connection of TVs together using a variety of media, both wired and wireless, using UWB as a form of home communications network.
While Pulse~link accepts that it can’t really sue Tzero just for coming after the same business applications as it is going after, it thinks it can fall back on its 300 strong patents, some granted, some applied for, that see it dominating the intellectual property arena around UWB. The patent in particular that it has dusted off and aimed squarely at Tzero is US patent number 6,970,448, which describes a way of two separate slave transceivers operating in different bandwidths with different data rates, and being controlled by a third transceiver by use of timed command slots, which are capable of UWB communications up and down the spectrum.
We’re not UWB experts but this looks like one of the core methods for controlling multiple devices around a home that might suddenly want to broadcast huge amounts of data, like a video stream from a set top to a TV, for instance. It talks about multiple orchestrated TDMA carriers and articulates in detail how similar technologies have been used in the past, for instance for satellite transmission, but which had various limitations that the Pulse~link patents get around.
We put various questions to Pulse~link’s President Bruce Watkins this week and he wanted to make it clear that the company has always offered its patents as a basis for industry standards, but has never been taken up on its offer. As a result Tzero has been telling anyone that listened that Pulse~link, despite inventing the entire notion of UWB transmission technologies, is the outsider and the only proprietary offering in the market. So Pulse~link is simply taking on this one UWB start up which uses Multi Band OFDM as a basis for its technology, but which it believes has to use some of the Pulse~link patents in order to achieve what it claims in its latest press release. Pulse~link technology is more about pulses of radio energy that do not run on specific carrier waves, more like optical transports. But all other parts of the technologies are similar.
Watkins is very clear that he doesn’t want an across the board legal battle with Intel and Texas Instruments and the huge array of adopters, contributors and promoters that make up the WiMedia Alliance, including Alereon, HP, Kodak, Microsoft, Nokia, NXP, Samsung, Sony and STMicro.
But Pulse~link may not be able to avoid it. At present Pulse~link seems to have picked a patent that will differentiate what WiMedia in general are doing and what Tzero in particular is up to.
Most WiMedia UWB members are chasing the markets being created in Bluetooth and USB where both standards committees have chosen the WiMedia technology as a basis for future generations.
Watkins said, ‘This is only about Tzero. We really are trying to get along positively within our industry. We are engaged with several prominent WiMedia member companies for our specific market applications, and so we value and want to maintain positive community relationships.’
Pulse~link doesn’t want to become an IPR only business, and is building its Cwave chips to offer speeds of above 1 Gbps both through the air and over coax. The WiMedia platform operates somewhat slower, and there was a three way IEEE standards war during 2003 and 2004 over which technology to adopt, with Freescale being the other proponent. In the end none of them was chosen. This only came about after a 7 year battle conducted by Pulse~link to get the US FCC to understand that UWB signals are beneath the noise floor of other communications, and don’t interfere with them. Since the FCC has given in on this point, the market has been invaded by other players, and regulators in Europe, China and Japan are all working in parallel to get to the point where UWB signals are allowed in those territories.
Watkins added, ‘Technically speaking, and from a patent standpoint, often there are a very limited number of technical pathways to overcome a particular problem. If you are the very first to tackle a problem that forms the basis of a new business idea, you are often the first to see all the ways that problem can be tackled. This opens an opportunity to file patents on applicable technical solutions that enable the very foundations of a new business idea.’ In other words you don’t file patents on the business idea itself.
Pulse~link was the first to demonstrate UWB over wired channels such as coax when much of the UWB industry scoffed at the idea and it also showed wireless HDMI using JPEG2000 in the summer of 2005, and while it gets a lot of government and military business by being experts in UWB, its main chance to grow as a company is to become the digital home high volume transmission technology of choice for sending either uncompressed video signals between devices or for ultra high speed transmission of video to portable devices and handsets.
Watkins also raises some other issues about WiMedia Alliance technology. ‘In our technical opinion the OFDM-UWB approach won’t ultimately work adequately to accomplish what we perceive to be the necessary performance required to successfully enable the market we pursue,’ (in local digital video delivery).
UWB is also up against line of sight systems in 60 GHz which has also attracted attention for the digital home high volume video standard and Toshiba announced breakthroughs here just last week at a chip symposium, which suggests that although this technology can do the job, it will be years before it is ready for market.
What Tzero and its WiMedia partners does next will really decide what will happen in this critical high speed personal transmission market. If Tzero just fights its corner, it’s a small news item and it will get resolved, probably with some form of out of court settlement. But if the WiMedia Alliance backs its member and wades in heavy handed, supporting its right to take the Multiband OFDM technology wherever it likes, then the UWB wars could get messy all over again, this time in the courts. Tzero and Samsung already appear to be best buddies over this technology, and have worked together on HANA technology (High Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance), as has Pulse~link, and the fact that the UWB digital home market could end up as a multi-billion device chip business, affecting the capabilities of every consumer electronics device, is bound to attract some powerful vested interests.