‘You pays your money and takes your choice.’ That’s how most people now feel about the bewildering number of choices for sending both compressed and uncompressed, wired and wireless, video around the home, and there have been announcements in the past week from at least three of them.
The latest has been the formation of a new industry alliance called the HDBaseT Alliance, and this has formed around Israeli chip designer Valens Semiconductor with its initial members being LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics and Sony Pictures Entertainment (surely that’s the wrong part of Sony, Sony Electronics would have been better).
HDBaseT is an adaptation of cheap Ethernet style communication with the added properties that it works on a new PAM (Pulse Amplitude Modulation) physical layer and can send uncompressed video way above and beyond HD (around 5 x HD at 120 Hz with 10 bit or 12 bit video encoding up at around 13 Gbps), along with electric power and a return bulk data path, all over a single CAT5e cable. This is a cable that can be used to power your TV, send data to and from a gaming console and carry HD plus resolutions of uncompressed video.
This is the type of network that may get installed in a couple of years all over new homes, to future proof them against further wiring requirements.
The HDBaseT Alliance will engage players across the consumer electronics and content industries to create a standard for advanced digital media distribution covering TV sets, projectors, professional AV equipment and home theaters.
‘We firmly believe that in today’s industry a standard must have broad consensus and support from the major players in the industry. For this purpose, we are actively working with such leading companies across the value chain to assure broad support and active participation in the newly formed HDBaseT Alliance,’ said Dror Jerushalmi, CEO, Valens Semiconductor.
Key players in the consumer electronics industry have been introduced to HDBaseT technology and it is expected that other global market leaders will join the HDBaseT Alliance and together work to finalize the standard, a statement said.
The four founding companies say that the Alliance is expected to release new details about more global leaders joining the Alliance in the upcoming weeks.
The Valens idea is that fundamentally you take 10 Gb Ethernet components and mess around with them. Which is why it calls its product line HDbaseT (10baseT is an Ethernet term, HD is a video term). Valens has also managed to create its own packet size to accommodate different types of traffic, including both HDMI and IP packets.
We know that Valens already has HDBaseT systems which already work and there is working silicon, but it is a wired technology. Not so certain was last week’s announcement of the specification of the WiGig
The Wireless Gigabit Alliance (WiGig) plans to use 60 GHz spectrum and says that it has completed its unified wireless specification. Members will get the spec in Q1 2010, but when will the chips come? We have heard unkind estimates that not only might it take two years to design a chip that can use this spec, but that it might simply not work.
We are inclined to accept this view, even though there are many mighty companies behind this new standard, including Atheros, Broadcom, Dell, Intel, LG Electronics, Marvell, MediaTek, Microsoft, NEC, Nokia, Nvidia, Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba and Wilocity plus contributors Agilent, AMD, Beam Networks, NXP, Ralink Technology, Realtek, SK Telecom, STMicroelectronics, Tensorcom, Texas Instruments and TMC
But there was just as powerful support (many of them the same companies) for the WiMedia Alliance and its just didn’t work, underperforming to the extent that it achieved perhaps 15% of the spec, and that was after five years of work, simply because some of the early technology decisions were just plain wrong. If this had been called WiMedia II instead of WiGig, nobody would trust this group to bring working technology to market. Remember WiMedia was shooting for between 500 Mbps and 1 Gbps, and now this spec takes the same failed ideas, moves them into 60 GHz spectrum and is aiming for a ten fold improvement (7Gbps) on the back of a system which delivered 15% of spec and was abandoned.
By calling it WiGig it makes it appear to have the solid success of Wi-Fi behind it, but we have doubts. Sure it will use the 802.11 Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, but it is the underlying PHY that is the problem here.
Which is why our piece last week, where we extolled the potential of WHDI, which thinks it can stay ahead of Wi-Fi video. Yes it’s true that no-one expected WiGig to have a spec this early, but a spec is not a working prototype chip.
WHDI has no existing silicon but the main technology supplier in the platform, Amimon has shown its ideas working in Silicon in the past. Against all expectations the WHDI Consortium completed its specs last week.
These will carry HD video at 1080p, 60Hz refresh rates and 12-bit color depth, over distances of up to 100 feet at speeds up to 3Gbps in wide 40MHz channels.
If all three of these technologies were in the stores and working today, you’d pick WiGig, but the jury is out of all of them, one lacks support, one lacks a viable chip time to market and the other is a purely wired model. They may all have a future, or none of them may.