UltraWideBand inventor Pulse~Link has scored a major hit in the war to offer a single unified set of wireless and wired connections for the digital home. It has won a courtroom battle against WiMedia Alliance member Tzero, and has turfed it out of the market for applying WiMedia chips to both media.
Increasingly it seems obvious that the home networking market is both overcrowded and yet still needs innovation. There is existing coaxial cable in most Pay TV homes, and increasingly there is a requirement for multimedia devices to speak to each other using wireless connections. Pulse~link has consistently been one of the only players that can offer wireless connections fast enough for multiple streams of losslessly compressed HD video, while at the same time holding many of the patents for using the same chips to offer the same form of communications over coaxial and other forms of wired connections, using its proprietary CWave chipset.
Exactly a year ago WiMedia Alliance member Tzero Technologies was claiming a UWB chip which also worked on both coax and wireless transmission at rates up to 300 Mbps, and last year began to get its first design wins.
Pulse~Link virtually invented pulse based UWB, and has filed around 350 patents relating to that and to how systems can be built using such carriers.
Straight away Pulse~Link filed against Tzero saying it was in breach of US patent number 6,970,448, which describes a way of two separate slave transceivers operating in different bandwidths with different data rates, and being controlled by a third transceiver by use of timed command slots. This is all about a single UWB service delivering to multiple devices around the home. It was this and other patents (numbered 6,895,034 and 7,099,368) that this week a US court said are valid and enforceable, a decision which has meant that Tzero has immediately dropped out of the market for coax based UWB HD video transmission.
In the settlement, Tzero said it would cease development of those products which were the subject of the legal action, and said it would buy a license from Pulse~Link before it re-entered this market.
Pulse~Link has always insisted that it will offer its intellectual property on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms but has never had its technology taken up by a standards body. It originally proposed its ideas for the IEEE803.15a committee, but ran into a wall of objections from the WiMedia Alliance, which got behind a very different carrier based version of the technology invented by Texas Instruments. TI itself said recently that it was de-emphasizing the area of research and that UWB was probably three years away from being useful to TI, which wants to use it in handsets.
Bruce Watkins, co-founder and COO for Pulse~Link, said ‘We remain committed to contributing our considerable body of Intellectual Property within industry groups willing to collaborate so that best-in-class performance, interoperability and peaceful signal-coexistence are assured for the consumer.
Significantly Sigma Designs, the chip maker which provides the set top chips for the Microsoft Mediaroom IPTV set tops (along with STMicro), last week said that it had a WiMedia Alliance compliant chipset and that it too was chasing the coaxial market alongside the Wireless market for transmitting HD signals around a home.
In the end the HD community is torn between the competing standards of MoCA, HPNA, HDMI, Firewire, HomePlug, UPA, Ethernet and USB and a few others for high speed wired protocols, and Wi-Fi and the various newcomers in the flavors of UWB, some of which will take in line of sight spectrum such as 60 GHz channels, and proprietary attempts to harness 60 GHz such as WirelessHD and WHDI.
What is needed is either for one of these systems to offer communication across all three, wireless, wired and powerline, which is where Pulse~Link is headed, preferably emulating the protocols of Firewire, HDMI and Ethernet across all physical layers (Pulse~link has elements of Firewire working on coax and over the air, as well as HDMI and Ethernet over coax), or there needs to be a simple communication scheme for mixing and matching these components in a plug and play way.
When we asked about Sigma, John Santhoff, CTO and founder of Pulse~Link said ‘Obviously, Pulse~Link follows all announcements within the UWB community with interest ‘ but after years of reading such press releases we take most with a grain of salt. Sigma is among a handful of other WiMedia UWB companies we’ve seen announce and demonstrate their technology over a wire, but they all seem to go quiet sooner or later and we think we have a firm technical understanding of the reasons why. Interestingly, despite press release claims, none have ever been verified in the end to achieve even 30% of our CWave performance. Also, as recently shown in the Consent Judgment we do have patents that are valid and enforceable that we are willing to defend. That said, we have always stated that we are willing to make our Intellectual Property available to those, Sigma or anyone else, who are willing to collaborate with us to deliver best-in-class performance, interoperability and peaceful signal coexistence to the mutual benefit of all of our customers.’
The core thing here to our way of thinking is that Pulse~Link is a small inventor, and as such is ‘mostly harmless’ to the major chip makers. While Tzero has NOT come out and said it will license the Pulse~Link technology, it is a huge clarification that Pulse~Link can keep people out of some core markets. That either leaves multi-protocol, multi physical layer HD markets for Pulse~Link, or it opens the way for patent agreements between the major Digital Home networking companies and Pulse~Link, or else they will risk being held in a standoff ‘ either wired or wireless, but not both ‘ which will put them at a disadvantage.
The best way to wire up a home is to not wire it at all, and to put down a protocol like CWave that can co-exist on existing power lines and coax, and use this as 1 Gbps trunking around the home, and then spray the signal around a room using similar speed, low power wide spectrum wireless. So far the only company that has shown it can do this is Pulse~Link.