Format war looms for new wireless standard - Breaking - Technology
The UWB Forum - led by Motorola spinoff Freescale Semiconductor - and the WiMedia Alliance - supported by Samsung Electronics and chip-makers Intel and Texas Instruments - had been trying to unite on a single standard since forming a task group with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers in 2003.
The IEEE has been the umbrella group for a number of successful standards, including Wi-Fi.
“After a year or so of arguing, unfortunately the thing started to become more personal,” said Roberto Aiello, chief technology officer of Staccato Communications Inc. and the secretary of the WiMedia Alliance. “We started to be more apart rather than closer to finding a solution.”
Freescale got a head start on UWB in 2003 by buying Xtreme Spectrum, a company that already had a working prototype chip, and wanted that chip to be the basis of the standard.
At the same time, the WiMedia Alliance wanted to go in an entirely different direction. While Freescale’s chip sent out extremely rapid “clicks” of radio signals over a wide range of frequencies, the WiMedia Alliance wanted to use a method of dividing the spectrum into a large number of channels and transmitting over them simultaneously, almost like playing the piano with a finger on every key.
On the other side, Martin Rofheart, director of the UWB operation at Freescale, said the effort toward hammering out a common standard “has been stalemated for some time. We felt for our part that it wasn’t going to produce a specification that would be useful to the industry.”
The UWB Forum and Freescale are promoting a personal-computer-centred approach to introducing usage of UWB, emphasising it as a replacement for the USB cables that connect computers with their peripherals. Rofheart said their Cable-Free USB standard is designed to work with existing computers and peripherals without requiring upgrades or new software.
[Source: theage.com.au]
