Hotwired UWB bypassed by higher speed freakery

ULTRA WIDEBAND (UWB) technology is getting a lot of jawboning as a "standard" way to deliver 480 Mbps at short distances without wires. However, there's one company that's decided to bypass the whole Wireless USB scrap and proceed directly to higher speeds. Pulse~LINK (www.pulse-link.net) of San Diego is currently shipping an UWB evaluation and development kit (EDK) that is capable of transmitting and receiving data rates of up to 1 Gbps throughput at distances of up to 40 meters.

At a recent Homeland Security trade show in Washington D.C. I got a chance to witness the Pulse~LINK EDK in action. My first impression was "My, what big brassboards you have!" Each EDK is a double-height PC chassis 9 inches high that holds a double-height, full-length PCI card. There's also a separate power connector for the top half of the card, but there's a reason for all the real estate. Bruce Watkins, President of Pulse~LINK, says the board is divvied up into different parts for MAC and PHY level operations. As they replace the brassboards with actual silicon, engineers can replace the ugly conglomerate of boards in a plug-and-play fashion to verify specs and performance between the first run chips and the much larger real-estate they have running now.

Complementing the double-high PC enclosure is a separately mounted transmit/receive array that's about a foot square and also very green. It's not pretty, but it works. The full kit comes with four UWB radios, antennas, and all necessary cables, so you can set up a small "piconet" for hardware and software development. Everything is designed to be FCC compliant, but they still haven't gotten an official stamp of approval yet.

Pulse~LINK had a piconet setup in a 20 foot by 20 foot booth with antennas at all four corners, with video streamed to three of the four corners; two streams were "canned" pulled off of a DVD while the third was a live feed from a video camera. A spectrum analyzer was hooked up in the booth and used to demonstrate that their UWB solution couldn't be detected out of the background noise; interestingly, the 2.4 GHz frequency was quite active. Several venders were running unsecure Wi-Fi networks on the show floor and the analyzer was also picking up some other RF noise as vendors turned on motors to their gear for demos.

So why is Pulse~LINK so interesting? The company's aiming its solution at a range of markets, including as a cable replacement for DVI and HDTV. Interestingly, if you can get high speed data rates without wires, you can take the same basic technology and slap it onto a highly controlled medium - i.e. a wire - and get some really hot results. The company has demo'd their technology with cable plant and power line technology with up to 1 Gbps download speeds and several hundred megabits upload speeds over 1,000 feet of coax cable. Plugging this into a cable plant would require new set top boxes and head-end equipment, but it should be competitively priced as a replacement to old gear.

Pulse~LINK expects to sample first silicon in May or June of this year with "commercially available" quantities of chips available in the first half of 2006. The company has raised $35 million from a group of Kuwaiti investors. It'd be nice to see it hook up with some old-fashioned Silicon Valley VC money in the future. µ