Samsung Electronics is to use Motorola's XtremeSpectrum
chipset for ultrawideband (UWB) wireless technology to transmit
multiple high-definition television (HDTV) streams.
The companies demonstrated three simultaneous HDTV streams from
a home media server to multiple displays at the Consumer
Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
Motorola acquired chipset supplier XtremeSpectrum in December
and is sampling the chipset to partners.
With the growing number of consumer electronics companies
pitching wireless media adapters and other home networking devices,
the chip industry is looking to UWB to create high-speed
short-range wireless networks. But as is the case with many
cutting-edge technologies, different companies have different ideas
about how best to implement the technology, and compete fiercely to
have their technology adopted as a standard.
A draft of the UWB standard is already under development by a
working group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics
Engineers (IEEE), the same organisation that ratified the 802.11
standards for wireless Lans.
Motorola's XtremeSpectrum chipset is based on a method called
direct-sequence CDMA (code division multiple access). That method
competes with a different proposal from Texas Instruments which
uses technology called multiband OFDM (orthogonal frequency
division multiplexing).
The XtremeSpectrum approach spreads the UWB signals traveling
from device to device across the electromagnetic spectrum, from
3.1GHz to 10.6GHz, which is the range approved for UWB by the US
Federal Communications Commission. Because the signal is spread so
widely, the transmissions are less likely to cause interference
with other wireless devices, according to XtremeSpectrum.
Texas Instruments, which is backed by an industry consortium
that includes Intel, chose to divide that spectrum range into bands
of spectrum measuring 528MHz wide. This allows the signal to hop
back and forth between those channels if interference presents a
problem, "sculpting" the available spectrum to best suit the
environment in which the technology is used, said Steve Turner,
director of business development for UWB at Texas Instruments.
Both approaches hope to enable transmission speeds as fast as
500Mbps across distances of around 2m, Turner said. The two
approaches have been whittled down from more than 20 submitted to
the IEEE working group last year, and the group is to meet next
week to discuss the proposals again.
To be ratified, 75% of the working group members have to approve
the standard. Texas Instruments has, so far, only managed to get
about 60% of the tally in two previous votes.
When a standard is ratified, UWB is poised to become the primary
method for transferring data among devices such as personal digital
assistants, PCs and mobile phones.
Bluetooth, which is the existing standard for short-range
wireless networking, is slower than UWB and is expected to be used
for less bandwidth-intensive applications such as wireless
keyboards or mice, Turner said.
Tom Krazit writes for IDG News Service