UltraWideBand (UWB) technology is best remembered for a damaging battle, over a decade ago, between two factions aiming to establish it as a standard for wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Then, groups led by Freescale and Intel respectively failed to compromise and ended up condemning UWB to the back burner in the consumer wireless space. But the core technology has still been under development for more specialized and industrial applications, as well as remaining at the heart of one of the 802.15.4 family of IEEE standards for WPAN (15.4a). Firms like Ireland’s Decawave have used UWB for ultra-precise positioning and tracking, for applications like search and rescue, and now a new consortium has been launched targeting similar sectors. The FiRa…