Five years ago, Intel lit a fire under a short range wireless technology called UltraWideBand (UWB), which it said could be the basis of standards for many emerging markets, from high definition home media networks to PC-peripheral connections. UWB was supposed to aim for multi gigabit per second speeds, and kick off at half a gigabit.
After a long saga of standards body battles, regulatory hurdles and disappointing product performance, the chip giant has ended its research effort in UWB, at the same time that one of the most promising start-ups, WiQuest, closes its doors.
Intel launched an internal UWB design effort in 2003 under its new business initiatives group, which has now been scrapped. However, its most high profile activities were in driving standards. Working with Texas Instruments ‘ which put its own UWB activities on the back burner some months ago ‘ it tried to get a UWB-based standard adopted by the IEEE, and having failed, took the technology, WiMedia, to another standards body, ECMA. However, although WiMedia is the basis of the Wireless USB standard, other groups that were interested in using it, such as Bluetooth SIG, have gone cold, amid disappointing performance of early WiMedia products.
WiMedia may now struggle to gain market traction, but that does not mean the end of UWB, which is the basis of other standard and proprietary technologies, notably Pulse~Link’s C-Wave system for high definition video networks. To a large extent, UWB was ahead of its time, and its performance potential has often been strangled by regulatory restrictions. It is sure to re-emerge into the limelight for future standards, but for now, it seems to have been eclipsed by Wi-Fi and other efforts such as the 60GHz developments.
Other WiMedia pioneers, such as Staccato and Artimi, also look in danger of being casualties of the UWB shake-out. Fewer than 100,000 UWB-enabled devices shipped last year, according to research by InStat.
On cue, this week Staccato reminded us that it was alive and well, and said that its 65nm all-CMOS implementation of the WiMedia Alliance version of UWB is the first single-chip to achieve PHY certification for WiMedia’s new Spectrum Extension Release (SER) in multiple bands from 3.1 GHz all the way up to 9 GHz. The chip also offers support for detect and avoid, a process Europe decided was necessary for UWB chip licensing to safeguard mobile spectrum, which of course it’s not.