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Xtremely Cool
By Mark Long -- e-inSITE, 7/19/2002
XtremeSpectrum came to San Francisco this week to demonstrate the functionality of its new Trinity chipset for ultra-wideband (UWB) applications. In an interview with e-inSITE, CEO Martin Rofheart said that the first products to use the new chipset are scheduled to take their inaugural bows next January at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. First-generation deployments are likely to be in the form of a plug-in card featuring a new embedded antenna design that the company is keeping under wraps for the moment. But by the next round of deployment, UWB should be firmly seated within the box itself.
'Since our announcement of the industry's first ultra-wideband product last month, the response to Trinity has been tremendous,' said Rofheart. 'With six simultaneous streams of video, this demonstration is intended to showcase not only the high performance capabilities of our ultra-wideband product, but Trinity's ability to co-exist with systems and products in the popular 2.4 GHz and PCS/cellular ranges found in most homes today. And, not only does Trinity co-exist with these various technologies, but the video remains unperturbed despite moving people, furniture and walls, all of which are factors in a typical residential scenario. Based on this demonstration, we believe ultra-wideband will become the pervasive wireless technology for consumer connectivity applications.'
Rofheart also reports that the company has already tested configurations in which its UWB chipset rides piggyback on the same board containing both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi functionality. According to the XtremeSpectrum CEO, there will be no problem in the development of multi-mode cards that can equip a variety of consumer electronics devices with multiple ways to communicate with the outside world.
The Only Game In Town
Right now Trinity represents the only UWB game in town, which has elevated XtremeSpectrum to the status of an industry pioneer. But as Ted Turner once said, you can always tell the pioneers because they are the ones with the arrow sticking out of their posteriors. Painfully aware that major chip manufacturers such as Intel have set their sights on UWB as a potentially lucrative emerging market, the company is doing its best to make hay while the sun shines.
Introduced at the end of last month, XtremeSpectrum's Trinity chipset has been designed to wirelessly transmit data at speeds of up to 100 Mbit/sec in full compliance with FCC rules approved last April (See FCC Authorizes Ultra-Wideband Technology ). The new Trinity chipset is destined for deployment in media-centric products to enable digital displays, camcorders, DVD players, digital video recorders, and digital cameras to both send and receive digital multimedia streams at ultra-high speeds.
During this week's demo in SF, the company broadcast six video streams to six separate flat panel displays simultaneously across the room using a single ultra-wideband connection. The streaming video featured true 'wire-like' performance while co-existing with an 802.11b system, a microwave oven, a cellular/PCS phone and a cordless phone, all in simultaneous operation. One major question, however, is whether the consumer market is really ready and in need for such bandwidth intensive capabilities.
According to the company, higher rate encoding standards such as HDTV and MPEG-2HD (High Definition) are also expected to fuel demand for UWB technology as the means for distributing these higher rate transmissions, which demand in excess of 20 Mbit/sec per video stream. As leading DVD companies move to MPEG-2HD, the need for a wireless home technology that can deliver extremely high bandwidth for multiple channels of digital video transmission will become even more evident that it is today, claims the company.
XtremeSpectrum also points to the impending emergence of TI's Digital Light Projection technology for home theater applications as another example of where the market is heading. Right now Trinity offers the means by which video could be distributed to DLP sets wirelessly. The security issue is another important consideration because of the overhead demands that it places on wireless distribution systems. The Trinity chipset has more than enough digital space to spare to accommodate the encryption overhead of security systems.
The first-generation Trinity chipset has a limited range that could not be used to fulfill the needs of extremely large household compounds. However, the company reports that it is currently investigating methods for boosting the coverage of its next-generation UWB technology by allowing the individual chipsets to intercommunicate--handing off signals off from one chipset to the next--so that a single system deployment could cover larger households or even entire office suites. This potentially could increase the product's overall range to 100 meters or more. The method for accomplishing this will be some form of a mesh architecture that is similar to what companies such as MeshNetworks have already developed for mobile broadband applications. This also would allow the technology to be deployed in additional markets pertaining to broadcasting and videography, where Trinity could then be used to wirelessly distribute bandwidth-intensive video content between cameras and tape decks or even between adjacent television studios.
It doesn't appear that UWB will be sprouting wheels of its own. The company says that the inherent limitations of the UWB chipset's MAC layer prevent the technology from being used at vehicular speeds. However, those limitations should not keep UWB from eventually hooking up with mobile broadband systems, both in plug-in cards as well as in-the-box configurations.
Under Wraps
During the demo in SF, the chipset's antenna was hidden under a piece of tape to keep inquisitive eyes from latching on to the basic principles involved. The ariel represents a major reduction of size over what the company demonstrated to this writer at their Mountain View offices last March (See Ultra-Wideband Platform Streams MPEG-2 Movies At 10 Mbit/sec ). What can be said at the moment is that it is embedded within the layers of the board and involves the requisite geometrical shapes for generating a toroid-shaped antenna pattern.
Capable of wirelessly transmitting two or more high definition video streams simultaneously, the Trinity chipset consists of four ICs: a medium access control (MAC) based on the emerging IEEE802.15.3 standard (XSI 141), the digital baseband chip (XSI 122), the RF transmit and receive chip (XSI 112 ) and a receiver/low noise amplifier (XSI 102). The XSI 102 is manufactured in a low-cost silicon germanium process, while the remaining three chips are manufactured in standard 0.18 micron digital CMOS technology. In addition, the entire chipset reportedly consumes less than 200 mW of power.
Based on the emerging IEEE802.15.3 standard, the XSI141 chip provides a MAC function that leverages the benefits of a protocol that has been specifically designed and optimized for the efficient distribution of 'wire-like' digital video and audio. The remaining XSI122, XSI112 and XSI102chips form a complete physical layer function based on XtremeSpectrum's patented bi-phase modulated ultra-wideband technology.
XtremeSpectrum has also introduced a compact flash form factor reference design for the new chipset that incorporates its proprietary omni-directional antenna design for printing on standard PC board material so that it can be manufactured in extremely high volumes. This antenna is a critical component for meeting the FCC's spectral mask requirements as well as in delivering the performance capability of the complete system, claims the company.
In comparison to other forms of UWB, Trinity's patented bi-phase modulation scheme reportedly yields a 2x improvement in overall power efficiency, claims the company, with the spectral shape of bi-phase modulation inherently enabling the chipset to more rapidly reduce its out of band emissions to meet the FCC's emissions limits in the lower frequency bands (under 3.1 GHz) without requiring any additional functionality. Bi-phase modulation, which does not suffer from the inefficiencies of CSMA/CA protocols such as the IEEE802.11 MAC, always delivers twice the data rate as a function of distance compared to other forms of UWB modulation, reports the company. In addition, Trinity has been designed to scale performance in direct proportion as it moves up to faster semiconductor process technologies with no need for enhancing the to the chipset's basic system architecture.
XtremeSpectrum intends to deliver its Trinity chipset as a physical layer evaluation kit to OEMs of consumer electronics, display, computer, and peripheral products beginning this quarter. Commercial production is scheduled for mid 2003, and end user consumer electronics products leveraging Trinity are then expected as early as Christmas 2003. The Trinity chipset is priced at $19.95 each in 100K quantities.
