High-tech

Uweeba (uwb) - from bandwidth to bucks? Part one

By The Chilli analysts

Introduction

Coming soon to a high-tech hub near you, from the industry that gave you Firewire, usb, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, we now have uwb (ultra wideband), pronounced 'Uweeba'. Uweeba is a high-bandwidth wireless technology that has the potential to provide audio/video streaming for the home, as well as enabling accurate, low-cost location tracking. The Chilli examines uweeba with a view to identifying market barriers, inhibitors, challenges and opportunities for both entrepreneurs and investors.

What is uweeba?

What are the challenges

What can you do with it?

What's required to enter the game?

What is uweeba?

Uweeba is a radio technology that transmits digital data across a wide frequency range over short distances. It makes use of ultra low power, to literally hide under other transmission frequencies such as existing Wi-Fi, GSM and Bluetooth. It can thus co-exist at least in theory with other rf technologies. Uweeba uses short, sharp impulses to modulate information across a very wide frequency spectrum. These pulses, being short in duration (in the time domain) give rise to spectral components covering a very wide bandwidth in the frequency spectrum, hence the term ultra wideband. The technology was initially developed for military radar applications that could penetrate through dense ground cover.

Being of very wide bandwidth, uweeba will emit energy across a spectrum of services, e.g. mobile, wlan, gps (global positioning system), etc. With its low transmit power, of the order of 50 microwatts (1/10,000th the power of a mobile phone), uweeba signals will appear as noise to non-uweeba receivers, thereby allowing uweeba to coexist with these services in shared spectrum.

The narrow pulses used in uweeba potentially provide the advantage of robust resistance to multipath interference. Even indoors, minimum multipath delays are some tens of nanoseconds, still much greater than the uweeba pulse width. Therefore the reflected signals never interfere with the main path and are entirely separable at the receiver. In fact, it's possible to use a rake receiver to combine the multipath signals thus improving the signal-to-noise ratio.

Uweeba provides a number of advantages:

• High bandwidth over a short distance (e.g. 500Mb/s within 5m, 250Mb/s within 10m)
• Resilience to multipath interference (from signals 'reflecting' off metal objects)
• Penetration (uweeba signals can propagate through bricks and cement at 1cm resolution)
• Accuracy (e.g.10mm over 2m, 2cm over 20m)
• Multiple access (can support simultaneous transmissions in the same frequency band)
• Low transmit power makes interception and detection by 3rd parties difficult
• Lends itself to forming mesh networks (every node acts as repeater and router) where the network adapts as new nodes are added and removed, and is naturally resilient - the network survives if any of the nodes die

What are the challenges?

There are a number of challenges to overcome for uweeba to succeed, namely:

• Co-existence and interference: uweeba must operate in harmony with other services without interfering with them. The operation of uweeba shows that it technically 'interferes' with other systems, in that uweeba spectral components fall into another services spectral range, however, it has yet to be conclusively shown that it interferes in a harmful way with licensed services such as mobile phones and gps. Successful independent trials have to be carried out to convince a sceptical audience, especially government agencies, that this is indeed the case.
• Legislation: uweeba is currently only legal in the USA. In 2002, the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) permitted the marketing and unlicensed operation of uweeba devices for specific applications at specific frequency bands and power levels, under its 'Part 15 rules' for the operation of unlicensed, low-power rf devices. Legislative work is ongoing in Europe and elsewhere, with more legislation expected during 2004
• Standardisation & interoperability: standardisation of uweeba for wireless personal area networking (wpan) is taking place in the IEEE 802.15 group. Table one summarises the standards.

Table one: IEEE 802.15 standards

There are a number of different approaches being proposed for uweeba in 802.15.3a, including single-band pulse, multiband pulse and multiband ofdm (orthogonal frequency division multiplex). The single-band pulse approach offers a relatively simple radio design, resulting in lower cost. Critics of this approach (including Intel), contend that its lack of flexibility in spectrum management (dynamically sensing interfering technologies and suspending contending frequencies, choosing narrower bands of spectrum to share the spectrum in a local area, or adapting to regulatory requirements), make it unsuitable for mass deployment. The two multi-band proposals would require a more complex rf stage. The proposals for 802.15.3a will be voted on during July 2003, reducing the field to a handful of proposals, with a draft ready by the end of 2003.

For other applications where vendor interoperability is not a specific requirement, proprietary implementations exist and are already shipping.

What can you do with it?

The target markets for uweeba are a trade off between design-in time, product lifecycle, volume, costs and security of design, amongst other requirements. Table two summarises the target applications for uweeba:

Table two: application areas addressed by uweeba

One sweet spot for uweeba is media streaming in the home using set-top boxes, personal video recorders, dvd players, flat panel displays, etc. Uweeba overcomes the barriers to previous attempts at home networking:

• No cabling required (unlike Firewire)
• Resistant to multipath interference
• Adequate bandwidth to carry several MPEG 2 streams around the premises
• Isochronous support for jitter-free video (qos) from 802.15.3 standard or adaptation layer to run Firewire protocols (AV/C, HAVi, etc) atop uweeba
• Can potentially support a content protection mechanism to appease content developers (5C scheme originally developed for Firewire)
• Sub $10 cost per node (bill of material)
• Seamless interoperability between systems (common command set)

Other requirements for the consumer market will include:

• Low power consumption for battery-powered devices such as digital still cameras and mp3 players
• Adequate security: uweeba signals are hard to detect and intercept, but can still propagate through walls, so content vendors must feel satisfied that adequate measures have been taken

In terms of data transfer in computing applications, uweeba has an opportunity to supplant wired usb 2.0 for bandwidth-intensive imaging and printing applications.

A compelling application for uweeba is radar in the automotive industry. It is ideally suited for collision avoidance, detecting the movement and location of objects near a vehicle, improving airbag activation and suspension settings. Studies proving conclusively that uweeba will not interfere with gps will be vital, especially as the first cars to have collision avoidance will be the same premium models that also host gps-based telematics systems. This will be important in North America, as safety is a key driver in the automobile industry, with airbags, gps and E-911 emergency calling legislation. Barriers to the start-up focusing on this sector are quite tough, in that:

• Uweeba devices would have to support a wide range of automotive operating temperature and failure rate
• Design-in cycle for automotive projects are quite long; measured in number of years, dealing with the tier one vendor, carmaker, design standards (QS9000), car trials (winter/summer tests) and production ramp-up, could be resource intensive and exhaustive
• First cars to use it will be low-volume premium models, limiting early revenue opportunities

Car makers are also very conservative, and would be wary of working with startups, but as a secondary market, it would be possible to work in the automotive industry via a module partner who already has a supply relationship with the tier one vendor or carmaker. Security applications such as through-wall radar, appear attractive given today's focus on detection, but are best handled by established systems companies.

Tracking applications, involving the tracking of children, personnel, equipment and inventory, to an accuracy of less than one inch, are attractive, especially as uweeba can work indoors (factories, shopping malls), unlike gps. However, a number of things must be borne in mind in tracking applications:

• The uweeba device may require greater transmit power owing to the amount of noise in an industrial setting
• Wide temperature range operation may be required for some environments
• Selling to the many industrial businesses is best handled through semiconductor distributors who already supply a kit of parts to the customer
• Many tracking applications will be adequately satisfied by using cheaper rfid tags

What's required to enter the game?

In terms of silicon, uweeba requires a radio frequency (rf) transceiver, a low noise amplifier (lna), and baseband logic, including the modem (modulator-demodulator) and the media access controller (mac), as well as antenna switches and a power supply unit (psu). The software would include device drivers for the target operating system and a protocol stack.

It is important to note that uweeba is a raw standard for transmitting/receiving data. Other standards, e.g. Firewire and usb, encompass not only the raw transmission/reception of data, but also the high-level protocol issues related to specific applications (handled by the mac). For this reason standardisation work will be required to determine the mac to work atop of uweeba, e.g. the proposed 802.15.3a standard uses uweeba as a physical mechanism, working with the mac portion of 802.15.3 for wpan applications.

Uweeba lends itself to simple rf stages. The very short pulses in the picosecond range used to encode information by varying timing, amplitude and shape, can be generated by using simple digital techniques, eliminating the need for rf/if conversion stages, saw (surface acoustic wave) filters, etc.

Part two of this market analysis, including positioning, competition and an investors perspective, is available to registered subscribers on request. Please register for free and contact the author at Woz@theChilli.com to obtain it.

Comments on this story? Send an e-mail to Editor@theChilli.com

© Chilli Publishing Ltd 2003

15JUL2003