Operating over the full 3.1GHz to 10.6GHz spectrum
This past week Alereon achieved another industry first for UWB technology – we were the first company to introduce a UWB chipset for WiMedia and Certified Wireless USB applications that is capable of operating at any frequency band between 3.1GHz and 10.6GHz. For those of you that are highly technical, this is a remarkable feat of engineering. No company has ever produced a chip capable of covering such a broad spectrum of frequency for ANY radio standard, not just UWB. But for most people, the engineering marvel of this accomplishment isn’t nearly so meaningful as understanding how this impacts consumers. While it is probably not possible to spend as much time, energy and money as Alereon has on this chipset and still remain totally objective and unbiased on assessing the importance or meaning of this achievement, bear with me and let me try.
The motivation behind the new Alereon chipset was not the intrinsic challenge. The motivation was to simplify the effort of major PC and consumer electronics companies in their quest to provide new easy-to-use technology to their customers – the consumer. So what is the problem that such a chipset solves? In simple terms: incompatible radio frequency regulations among different countries. Consider the not so distant past, you couldn’t travel between the US, Europe, Japan and Korea and make a cell phone call on the same handset due to differences in the standards and frequencies for each country. UWB technology is in a similar situation today. The UWB regulations in the US, Europe, Japan, Korea and China have some similarities, but they are all different. At Alereon we recognized that for Certified Wireless USB and any WiMedia-based technology to be truly successful, a consumer needs to be able to take their digital camera on a trip and transfer pictures from it in every country they visit without requiring intervention or configuration on their part. We knew that PC manufacturers would like to integrate just one chipset into their products and be able to ship them to any country, knowing they will meet the regulatory requirements – thus simplifying their supply chain. We also wanted consumers in Japan and Korea to have the same user experience as consumers in the USA. We felt the user experience was particularly important because so many consumer products are designed/manufactured in Asian countries. Often new products come to market in Korea or Japan a full generation ahead of their introduction in the USA. If the user experience is highly compromised there due to regulatory constraints, it might slow the development and adoption of exciting new products for the market in the USA. Finally, we had one more objective. In the USA, homes, apartments and office buildings are generally larger and more spread out, they therefore have a much lower “density” than living spaces in China, Europe or Japan. It means that in those countries there is a need for more “channels” for device to use to avoid congestion, slower throughput and lowered battery efficiency, and thus reducing the promise, of UWB and Certified Wireless USB.
So, though the challenge was technically daunting, we designed our chipset such that consumers in Japan or Korea could fully utilize the high frequencies designated by their government’s radio regulatory bodies. Further, we did so in a fashion that gives consumers a full 17 channels to use in Japan and Korea. In practical terms, having 17 channels to use means that a device always has access to any other device it needs to connect to at the highest speed and lowest battery consumption available. Naturally, we didn’t do this because we are members of the international brotherhood of altruists. We did this because it is what our customers want, what consumers asked for, and because it is really difficult to engineer – so we differentiate ourselves from our competitors by doing it first, and by doing it well. Our advantage will of course be short lived. Competitors will move quickly to imitate us. Some will rise to the challenge. Others won’t. But the chip business is one of survival of the fittest. The strongest companies who deliver what consumers find useful at a competitive price prosper. Those that don’t – don’t.
As retail Certified Wireless USB products prepare to enter the market this summer and we truly enter the era of Life Without Wires™, ultimately the world, will in some small part have a talented group of engineers at Alereon to thank for bringing to market, and raising the bar for, the world’s first truly worldwide Certified Wireless USB chipset.
