Toshiba, Agilent, Beam Networks, Ralink and Texas Instruments have all joined the WiGig Alliance this week, with Toshiba landing a key board seat.
”The WiGig Alliance continues to gain critical mass as the wireless industry looks ahead to 60 GHz technologies to provide the needed throughput for emerging applications that require Multi’\Gigabit wireless connectivity speed,” said Dr. Ali Sadri, President and Chairman of the WiGig Alliance. ”Our newest members represent a cross’\section of chipmakers, device manufacturers and test equipment vendors that reinforce our efforts to develop and certify a technology that will span multiple platforms.”
We first came across WiGig back in May as an industry grouping chasing after the 60GHz spectrum space, backed by Intel, and the leading Wi-Fi chip makers in Broadcom and Atheros, and coming out of the IEEE 802.11 Very High Throughput (VHT) Wi-Fi study group.
Members include the bulk of the handset community Nokia, Samsung and LG, as well as dedicated handset chip makers like Marvell and MediaTek. The other initial members included Microsoft, Dell, Panasonic, NEC and Wilocity, a start up made up of Intel Centrino ex-employees, as well as NXP and ST Micro.
There remains a huge overlap between these and the members of the WirelessHD group, the first grouping that settled on 60 GHz transmission for the home, based on SiBeam technology from the US. There is an idea floating around that this work will somehow be incorporated into WiGig, and WirelessHD dropped, though nothing official has been said on this point. The absence of Sony and Philips in WiGig remains conspicuous.
While it may become THE successful 60 GHz consortia, we know from past experience, with some of these same members, that just bringing a lot of market power to bear on a wireless problem that is tough to solve, means diddly squat. Other people we”ve talked to reckon this is so ambitious a project that it may defy all of these combined R&D departments.
The new standard is for PC-handset interaction plus sending uncompressed HD signals around the home, something we remain skeptical about the need for, and even more skeptical that this grouping is any more than a talking shop for a technology that just won”t work in the short term.
There are key issues with 60 GHz spectrum itself. It quite simply cannot go through walls, so it is a technology for line of sight transmissions across a room. That being the case there are plenty of vital breakthrough applications that it could provide around the home. If it”s not going to be a full feature video capable technology which can support uncompressed HD video streams, then the use case is hyper fast file transfer ‘C for instance file delivery in seconds of large video files from either home servers to handsets or from kiosks to portable devices at the point of sale. In other words this is a Wi-Fi inspired 60 GHz protocol that will do the job which UWB was supposed to do for Wireless USB. On that basis it could have a future, and a big future, but if it could also have wider applications it could be an overnight success. Again provided it can be made to work and it can do it in very low power, to protect handset batteries.
The first WiGig specification is set to emerge by late 2009 with chips shortly to perform at 1.5 Gbps and later head up to 6 Gbps. Good luck guys.