Things go from bad to worse at the WiMedia Alliance, with its own version of multiband OFDM offered up for UltraWideBand. We revealed back in April that Texas Instruments, none other than the inventor of the technology championed by the WiMedia Alliance, had put the technology on the back burner, mothballing it for around three years.
Now a quick perusal down the members list of the WiMedia Alliance, reveals that its Board members are dropping like flies. Microsoft is gone, Hewlett-Packard is gone and Sony is gone, opting for slightly less glamorous participation at either contributor or adopter levels of membership, just in case the technology turns out to be useful in the distant future.
It’s hard to tell when the rot set in, perhaps at Christmas when wireless measurement specialist Octoscope revealed that it couldn’t get WiMedia products that were commercially available to go any faster than 50 Mbps, and when we challenged WiMedia itself, it only came up with some new chips running at 160 Mbps. Since then the Wi-Fi community has blindsided the WiMedia Alliance among its Bluetooth allies, arranging in February for Wi-Fi to act as a parallel transport to Bluetooth in version 3.0, where it had always been planned to be a WiMedia version of UWB.
Rumors that none of the members have been able to get Bluetooth chips to work have not done WiMedia any good in the Bluetooth camp and now its protocols, profiles, security and pairing can ‘momentarily’ use a secondary radio already present in the device in an architecture, called ‘Alternate MAC/PHY.’ When the speed of 802.11 is overkill, the connection returns to normal operation for optimal power management, or at least that’s the idea of the Special Interest Group, but it now means that Wi-Fi could benefit from many Bluetooth implementations.
At present the web site of the WiMedia Alliance still says that Nokia is a Board member, but it too is rumored to be ready to jump ship and STMicro has gone, although there was never any point with ST and NXP, which are mid-merger, both being on any board.
Members that have been added as replacements are hardly replacing like for like, in terms of industry impact, with the largest addition being Cambridge Silicon Radio, one of the dominant Bluetooth intellectual property holders and StoneStreet One, which writes drivers for UWB.
The chances are that the WiMedia Alliance will not last much longer, instead it will be absorbed into either the workings of the Wireless USB or the Bluetooth SIG or both, and the 200 or so member companies will all have to find another promising wireless carrier to base their hopes on.
The Motorola rival technology has fared little better, while Pulse~Link, with its 300 or so patents in UWB, and a handful of commercial implementations for its 1 GBps class of CWave pulse based ultra wide band chipsets, is virtually the sole surviving member of the original UWB clans that kicked up this whole idea of radio being used for ultra high speed, personal area network applications, and continues to plow its own furrow looking for a major design win built around sending multiple HD video signals over wires and radio, around a home.