Broadcom appears to have thrown its considerable chip-designing weight behind the WirelessHD standard which proposes using 60 GHz signals to send uncompressed high definition video signals around a room.
At the IFA show in Berlin this week it announced that it has become a promoter member of WirelessHD, a standards effort supported by Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba, NEC and LG Electronics who are lobbying the IEEE to bless the approach as a standard within its personal area networks (PANs) efforts numbered 802.15.3c.
This committee has always been expected to favor a UWB-based approach, ignoring both the WirelessHD Alliance and the 802.11 Wi-Fi groups which have expressed an interest in annexing the 60GHz range of spectrum, which requires short ranges and more or less needs line of sight.
So the Broadcom move is tough to understand given that it has made a lot of its money by success in Wi-Fi markets. But this looks like it is positioning itself not to become the kingmaker for the 60 GHz standard, but to benefit from it whichever technology gains favor, making it more or less agnostic.
Many UWB proponents have spoken out on the ludicrousness of sending uncompressed video around a home, especially when it has usually been expanded from lossy compression systems like H.264 in the first place. The difference for HD is enormous, with H.264 compressed HD taking up under 10 Mbps and uncompressed HD video needing multiple Gbps bandwidth.
Back in July Israeli start up Amimon added the support of Sony and Samsung, along with Hitachi, to go with its only other design win to date of Sharp, to push its WHDI technology as a standard for multi-room video. The company has long had investment from Motorola, which implies that Motorola may eventually be prepared to support Amimon’s WHDI chip sets which claim to be able to send multiple HD signals around a home using MIMO antenna and a 40 MHz wide OFDM carrier.
The Amimon approach uses a lossless compression standard which only halves the transmission requirement compared to uncompressed video, to around 1.5 Gbps for a 1080p signal. It also works by classifying each bit in the stream as either vital or not so vital and applies differing levels of error correction to them.
This suddenl addition of Sony and Samsung to the WHDI scheme suggests that they too are covering more than one option, since ostensibly they support WirelessHD too.
Meanwhile Pulse~Link is still plugging away with its version of pulse based UWB, carried over JPEG2000 encoding for video distribution and it is expected shortly to announced the addition of a modern FEC system for error protection.
So the 802.15.3c committee may have to indulge in fancy footwork and take a physical layer implementation for the 60GHz band and perhaps couple it with other MAC layers to create a converged standard which takes in the WiMedia Alliance, WiMAX or Bluetooth or all of the above, on a new physical layer. The WirelessHD standard can transmit at up to 4 Gbps in real time.
In the meantime this week WiMedia Alliance member Staccato Communications says that it has a second generation Ripcord2 UWB chip, built in 65nm CMOS. First generation chipsets used for Wireless USB were disappointing with 50 Mbps the fastest speeds achieved by independent testers.
Staccato says that this is the industry’s first implementation in 65nm and that it offers a quantum leap in power consumption, size and integration over existing chips. Jeff Chang, Staccato’s VP of Marketing says that the new chip should offer usable bandwidth over 200Mbps, as it gets the kinks out of the system eliminating things like driver latency and protocol inefficiencies, which compares far better with wired USB, which is advertised at 480Mbps, but has a ‘usable’ throughput of round 250-300Mbps.
Staccato reckons that this throws Wireless USB back into the equation as a video delivery mechanism around the home, and points out that the chip has detection and avoidance which have been mandated for UWB use in Europe and other territories outside the US. If so, all of that makes the wireless home networking market still impossible to call right now.