What do you think of the current UWB standards battle?
We've been pushing the concept of common signalling mode (CSM) as a way to let lots of different standards co-exist -- our work in that area is a little more than three years old now. We didn't start out by thinking it would be a good way for dissimilar UWB devices to be aware of each other. John Santhoff, our chief technical officer, said there aren't good co-existence models out there, and we needed them. We knew that whatever we came up with today, in five years' time we would definitely have found something better. John asked: "How can we ensure that future generations of our technology can recognise older technologies, maybe even using the UWB link to upgrade them to newer ideas?", which is the concept where the CSM came from. Let's devise a low data rate architecture that could always be a common denominator.
How are you going to get anyone to agree to this idea?
We'll be at the ITU UWB conference in Boston in June, where we'll demonstrate our shiny new test silicon. We've got no shortage of interested companies, including some very significant ones who've been into our offices on a regular basis, some weekly, and our objective is to go showcase these things in Boston and begin coalition based standards building with a couple of companies. We'll start that process this summer, initially with standardisation for putting UWB on cable, powerline and wireless. It's like Bluetooth -- you go to a trade association management firm who have all the legal templates, can manage forums, web sites, logos and all that sort of thing. We've hired someone to do this.
So you'll have a snazzy name and logo?
Absolutely!
Where will we see this technology first?
Take UWB over cable, which we've already deployed for government and security companies. We see it going to cable companies next, then into consumer electronics. There's a lot that needs to happen on the cable side of things. Wi-Fi is becoming a mature technology, we've all been reading for seven years about home gateways -- so why don't you see Wi-Fi inside set-top boxes? It adds cost, which the cable provider has to pay for, and it doesn't add anything that the consumer wants to pay for. Stuff like 802.11 doesn't have quality of service, which makes it difficult to sell to consumers. They don't want their streaming video interrupted every time the man next door browses the Web.
So things develop very fast, and cable companies find the cost of upgrading crippling. But with our chip, not only will it do all the wireless functions and give extra bandwidth over the cable system, it can be upgraded over the system itself.
