In a fairly lame announcement by Homegrid, the alliance supporting the ITU G.hn wired digital home standard, another handful of small silicon producers have joined the organization.
The newcomers are Kawasaki Microelectronics America and TangoTec as members of HomeGrid Forum, which the organization says join existing semiconductor members DS2, Ikanos, Intel, Lantiq, Sigma Designs and Texas Instruments.
The reason for rolling out new silicon vendors is because back in April it seemed like only Sigma Design’s Coppergate and the bankrupt Spanish DS2 were committed to making chips for the standard.
Intel and Texas may back the standard but won’t enter a low volume market until it is proven, while Ikanos is a small, $200 million, mostly DSL chip maker, and Lantiq a small German outfit about twice the size of Ikanos, which is the communications arm of Infineon, spun out in 2009. Given that DS2 is operating in the Spanish equivalent of Chapter XI bankruptcy and even though it has promised G.hn chips by the third quarter this year, unless it resolves its bankruptcy, it was beginning to look likely that the only possible G.hn chips would come from Coppergate, which was bought by DVD chip maker Sigma Designs back at the tail end of last year. Coppergate is well known for making chips for the HPNA standard, a rival to the increasingly dominant MoCA standard.
One chip supplier does not a market make, so it looks like Homegrid has combed the planet and come up with TangoTec, a small Israeli networking product supplier specializing in domestic and Multi-Dwelling Units, and every broadband technology you can think of ‘ WiFi, Ethernet, powerline and coax ‘ as far as we know it doesn’t actually make chips or plan to build G.hn chips, but more likely use some of them. The other player, Kawasaki Microelectronics America, a major ASIC vendor, has been a long term backer of HPNA and could easily add its weight to the G.hn chip effort if it wanted to, but again, has yet to openly say that it will make the chips. Currently it makes GPON components and all manner of chips using MIPs cores.
This week an agreement between the Broadband Forum and Homegrid will see the two organizations collaborate on a compliance and interoperability testing program for G.hn later this year.
But we’re still very confused. The entire idea behind G.hn was that this was a single MAC/PHY combination that can be used on power lines, coax and telco cabling. And the Phy is most definitely defined. But this week yet another announcement came out from ITU about the standard being complete.
It says that all three components of the new standard ‘ the Data Link Layer (G.9961), Physical Layer (G.9960) and coexistence protocol (G.9972) ‘ are now complete. Now the control of what can have access to the media resides in the Media Access Control (MAC), and that’s a sub-set of the Data Link Layer, part of the old OSI layered model of communications at level 2.
But the complete lack of detail leaves us questioning what happened here. We know this was passed at an ITU meeting on June 11th, we just don’t know what’s in it.
Reading between the lines, the arguments were between Intellon (which makes chips for Homeplug), DS2 (which makes chips for Powerline) and Panasonic and they each had very different MACs, all very proprietary. Presumably one of these came out on top, and since Intellon (the Homeplug chipmaker) back in October said it was instead working with MoCA to put their two technologies together, and since Panasonic is only a contributor, not one of the key promoters in Homegrid, it sounds like the DS2 MAC may have come out on top or at least been critical in shaping the new Data Link Layer standard.
What will now be important for the development of G.hn is that it comes to market ahead of the new MoCA-Homeplug work that Intellon and MoCA are racing to complete and ahead of MoCA 2.0 (see separate story in this issue).
If not there would be a choice between upgrading from the two most installed wired home networking technologies ‘ MoCA and Homeplug and going with the ‘no new wires’ strategy of G.hn, which will offer components which are not compatible with any great amount of installed equipment.
If a rival goes to the Spanish bankruptcy court and bids for DS2 assets, they could certainly, at the very least, make a nuisance of themselves.
If G.hn gets off the ground and it overcomes any remaining issues, such as chip reliability in what is an extremely ambitious standard, then G.hn could form the backbhone for IPTV, home automation, home security and smart grid devices such as electricity meters, heating and air conditioning systems, electrical appliances, electrical vehicles, and lighting systems.
But with a rising tide of 60GHz in-room wireless technologies trying at least to take part of this space, and the established presence of 30 million installed MoCA chips in multi-room DVR designs, if G.hn does anything but arrive smoothly to market, it will probably never happen.