IDF: Dueling ultrawideband teams to push ahead

SAN FRANCISCO - Backers of two different types of UWB (ultrawideband) networks next week will announce moves toward consumer products that use the short-range wireless technology.

The MBOA (Multiband OFDM Alliance) will announce it has formalized the MBOA Special Interest Group (SIG), which will complete a UWB specification and make it available to member companies at Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco. Meanwhile, ODMs (original design manufacturers) using UWB chips from Motorola Inc. subsidiary Freescale Semiconductor Inc., which use a different technology, will unveil modules complete with radios and software for consumer electronics and computing products.

UWB is intended for very high-speed wireless connections over 30 feet (9 meters) or less that could link home entertainment devices or take the place of USB (Universal Serial Bus) cables. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) has a task group to set a standard for the technology, which would be called IEEE 802.15.3a, but members of that group are deadlocked between MBOA's approach and the "direct sequence" technology backed by Motorola and other vendors.

The MBOA, a group of more than 160 member companies that support an ultrawideband technology using OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing), formalized the SIG so it could complete a pair of UWB specifications and make them available to member companies, said Roberto Aiello, an MBOA board member and founder, president and chief executive officer of UWB vendor Staccato Communications Inc. Leading MBOA members include Intel Corp., Texas Instruments Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Sony Corp. and UWB-specific vendors such as Staccato and Alereon Inc.

The SIG needs formal rules and legal status in order to manage the specifications because of issues such as intellectual property rights, according to Jim Meyer, vice president of business development at Alereon, in Austin, Texas. The specifications should be finished by year's end, with chips out in volume in mid-2005 and consumer products shipping during next year's fourth-quarter holiday shopping season, Aiello said.

In addition to finishing and promoting the OFDM specification, the SIG will work with other standards bodies to align its own technology with other layers of software to ensure that complete systems work well, Aiello said. These include the Wireless USB Promoters Group, the WiMedia Alliance and the 1394 Trade Association. The Wireless USB Promoters Group has endorsed MBOA's specification exclusively, Aiello said. The WiMedia Alliance was formed to define and promote specifications for PANs (personal area networks), and the 1394 Trade Association was organized around the IEEE 1394 multimedia connection standard.

MBOA's physical layer specification for UWB is complete, but details are still being worked out on the MAC (media access control) layer, which should be signed off by the end of this year, according to Aiello. The group already has equipment in the lab delivering USB 2.0 throughput at its full 480M bps (bits per second) speed, he said.

Formalizing the SIG is the latest step by MBOA to move its technology forward rather than wait for the IEEE task group to settle on a standard, Aiello said.