Intel rarely misses an opportunity to try to drive an industry standard, and it is clearly getting impatient with an impasse that threatens to stall work on personal area networks at 60GHz, where very high data rates can be achieved and where the future of high definition home networks is seen by many to lie. The chipmaker said last week that the industry needed to focus on a single platform, not ‘point solutions’, and is hosting an open workshop in October that it hopes will address some of the thorniest issues.
Two groups within the IEEE standards body are in a stand-off about the future of 60GHz, and threaten to develop two separate and incompatible standards, reducing chip volumes and raising costs. The 802.15.3c group is developing an early draft, which would build on the existing 802.15 family of short range systems and could also embrace UltraWideBand techniques. But the 802.11 section of the IEEE also wants to use 60GHz for a gigabit Wi-Fi network. Additionally, there are various proprietary groups looking to create de facto standards for this plentiful and generally license-exempt band.
“We really believe in a single interoperable solution, but many efforts are focused on point solutions,” said Lilly Yang, an Intel researcher speaking at the Intel Developer Forum last week. Yang outlined Intel’s own design for a system that could deliver up to 4Gbps over short distances (up to 10 meters), with or without line of sight. Presumably Intel is hoping it can position this work to be the unifying force over the various 60GHz efforts, and so increase its own influence over the evolution of pervasive wireless.
“We are talking about a diverse set of requirements for a diverse set of platforms,” Yang said. “We want one interoperable solution to support all these uses.’ The Intel workshop will be held October 6-7 at Intel Research in Hillsboro, Oregon.