The EE Times has covered the fall and fall of most UltraWideBand pioneers, but most of that has been on the back of a technology which just simply doesn’t work ‘ that pushed by the WiMedia Alliance. This week it covered the potential demise of the granddaddy of them all Pulse~link, who’s technology certainly works.
Pulse~link practically built the idea of UWB from the ground up, when a bunch of fiber optic engineers applied optical pulse thinking, rather than carrier wave thinking, to radio. It managed to get the FCC to see how harmless low powered pulses of radio are, right across great swathes of spectrum, and then pushed on to create chips which are capable of sending data 20 feet through two walls at data rates close to 1Gbps. Given the low power the technology used, this technique promised to be the basis for eliminating cables across the living room, and one which would drive the digital home.
There are tons of applications that this can lead to, raw transmission of HD video from device to device (why would you do that?), transfer of huge video files in near real time from set top to handset, a multi-room DVR which supports concurrent HD to multiple destinations. None of this would take much power and it would make CE devices simply better.
Then along came Intel and Texas Instruments and created a hybrid technology (Multiband OFDM) which quite simply missed the mark. It was back to the old approach of first creating a carrier signal to modulate then create a signal.
It now turns out that the 6 year war this has led to may have done for Pulse~link, which the EE Times said has had to lay off 45 of 60 workers and cease chip deliveries to existing clients. Despite fear, uncertainty and doubt tactics raised by the broadcast and cellular industries, as well as the Intel and TI driven WiMedia Alliance, that these techniques would interfere with existing signals, or did not live up to performance claims, Pulse~link thrived for a while. It signed deals with Westinghouse and Geffen and looked like it was slowly making its way into the living room.
Other areas where the company operated was in the highly secret world of Homeland Security where its original technology provided an almost invisible form of radio communications, virtually impossible to tap into. Now that Homeland Security business is perhaps just one where its senior engineers continue to advise and without chip deliveries to its partners, it will rapidly have almost zero revenue. It looks to us like its investors have mothballed the company, rather than sell off the 340 radio patents that it has amassed in its almost decade long existence, and will bring it out of mothballs once the way out of the recession is clear or as soon as an investor sees a way forward.
Meanwhile rival technologies for the digital home such as 60 GHz systems and wi-fi, will continue to gain momentum during the recession and maybe UWB technology will never take hold.
Already WiQuest, Tzero and Artimi have folded from the WiMedia camp, the WiMedia organization has been gifted to the USB and Bluetooth communities and Intel and Texas have pulled out of the area and set their clocks to wake it up again in about 3 years.
Pulse~Link told EE Times that it has some investors on the hook, but not enough to close a round, and explained that the particular investor that was to lead its last investment round had seen its entire portfolio of US investments halve in value. We understand that to be a Kuwati based investor.
The truth is that this is a bunch of highly talented engineers with some awesome patents, but most people don’t get it. What the company needs to do is one of two things ‘ license the technology (which it has tried) to a major chip business, or get itself acquired by such a business. Nether of these are going to happen right now and while it is participating with initiatives such as G.hn, which hopes to use one adaptor for coax, power and radio, these seem a long way from live products, which Pulse~link right now doesn’t have the money to commission anyway.
We once put a tentative value on Pulse~link of a few billion dollars, based on the idea of royalties on a universal low powered radio chip for around $1 which would sit in every TV, handset, set top, laptop, PC and many other devices. And if it had come out of Intel, such a chip may have had that outcome. Instead it has always been the outsider, an engineering driven company, which perhaps has struggled with the best way to bring its business to market. We wish it well.