On Faultline we love feedback, and when we reported that 8 WiMedia Alliance members had achieved WiMedia certification last week, UWB inventor Pulse~link felt prodded to respond through their CTO John Santhoff.
Those of you with long memories will recall the three way war between Pulse~link, the WiMedia Alliance led by Intel and TI, and Motorola’s own efforts at winning the blessing of IEEE over a standard for UltraWideBand. In the end the three broke away without a clear winner and WiMedia went its own way with bids to win out as the foundation for Wireless USB and next generation Bluetooth standards.
Interestingly we have yet to hear to what Pulse~link, with something like 200 patents in this area, feels it might charge as part of any patent pool for these standards ‘ that’s a war which has yet to happen.
Anyway Pulse~link has just got its second generation chip out, after the first was shown performing at 1 Gbps, compared with the WiMedia Alliance 480 Mbps, about double the speed. Pulse~link makes no claims as yet for the speed of the second generation chip, because it’s in the process of having its performance audited by an external benchmarking company.
Apparently CMP’s Designline found out about the test and put it to Pulse~link that it should have a regular test against the WiMedia Alliance recently certified chipsets, and asked permission to invite them.
It wasn’t too big a surprise that none of the WiMedia companies would consent to supply a radio for test and evaluation, but anyway the test will go ahead with chips that are already on the market including those from Pulse~link and Belkin, YE Data W-USB, IO Gear W-USB, Toshiba laptops using chips from Wisair, Alereon and WiQuest.
We’ll let you know once the results are out, but it might be tricky to sell a technology that runs at around 20% of the speed of another, which is what will happen if the Pulse~link chips runs at anything like 2.5 Gbps, the type of speed needed to send uncompressed HD video around a room, which is the use case that Pulse~link is most interested in.