Interconnects

Why the consortia virus is spreading

2008-07-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

I've got a simple theory for why we are seeing so many, sometimes overlapping wireless consortiums with sometimes overlapping memberships.

This week Amimon announced a group of top consumer companies backing its 5GHz technology for sending uncompressed video across the digital home. It competes directly with the WirelessHD group SiBeam helped launch around 60 GHz technology for in-room links. Last week Sony debuted a group backing its TransferJet for short range synchs.

I am speculating the startups in search of credibility and design wins that can help them bootstrap into the mainstream offer a deal that's hard to refuse: Contribute some time from a few engineers and you get a chance to look at and influence the technology to make sure it works well on your systems, and maybe even a lower cost for adoption if you decide to use it.

There's very little to lose on such a deal, especially for the giant consumer electronics companies who have been jumping into multiple groups. The lesson: When the consortia virus strikes, immunize yourself with a dose of reality. These groups sound important, but they may not be good predictors of who will use what in a consumer wireless market that is still a wide open field where many flowers will blossom.

Bogatin Begins Blog

2008-07-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

Just a quick shout out to consultant Eric Bogatin who runs the "Be the Signal" Web site and has recently started blogging on the topic of technical tips for signal integrity engineers. Eric is one of my go-to guys when the questions get too sticky for my limited on-the-job engineering training to handle, so I am sure practitioners and all those folks over at the SI-List will find this blog useful.

TransferJet takes wing

2008-07-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

Talk about being blindsided. I thought Sony's announcement at CES about its ultrawideband-based TransferJet technology was an anomaly, something that would die a quiet death. Surprise, a slew of consumer companies are saying this morning they will participate in an effort to standardize the technology.

Well at a claimed 560 mMbits/s (PHY rate?) and an easy touch-to-associate user model, they have a good start. And now with giants such as Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba and a handful of camera companies behind them, they have some clout.

As PR guru Susan Cain who forwarded the TransferJet release to me said, "Just what we need another wireless consortium!" Yeah, we have wireless USB, WirelessHD (60 GHz), WiFi Alliance, WiMedia, more out there now and more yet to come I know for a fact. Gotta find out more…

ABI makes UWB picks

2008-07-16T16:59:00.000-07:00

Market watcher ABI Research reported today that WiQuest, Alereon and Pulse~Link came out tops among ultrawideband suppliers when measured on a range of factors. All three offer physical layer, RF transceiver and media access controller silicon and the three are tops in numbers of announced design wins.

WiQuest leads the pack largely because it claims it has won sockets at Belkin, Dell, DLink, Lenovo and Toshiba, said ABI analyst Doug McEuen.

McEuen admits the outlook for UWB is not as rosy as when many of the startups were cropping up a few years back, in part because the goal of 480 Mbit/second devices is still elusive. "But its still quite a viable market," he added.

The salmon of the CEA

2008-07-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

The folks over at the Consumer Electronics Association are full of Omega-3s these days. They want to define a universal interconnect for media players by running copy protected High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) signals over the CEA's existing Portable Digital Media Interface (PDMI, aka CEA-2017).

That's a great and ambitious idea that would really serve consumer interests. Just imagine being able to take any media player and link it to any car or home docking station or other peripheral. Fabulous.

But, um, you know there's this company called Apple that makes this thing called an iPod. They have this tendency to sort of do their own thing. And sense the typical teenage consumer does not know the brand name for a second media player device, they can pretty much get away with these shenanigans, forcing the industry to follow their ad hoc-ish lead.

By the way, for those other companies--unknown to teenagers--also making media players there's this plug called USB. It's pretty popular. Maybe not quite the thing for a car in its current state, but these USB folks are pretty active in rolling out variantions and upgrades.

So my dear friends over at the CEA, I look forward to watching your ambitious efforts to swim upstream in digital media. If anyone has any observations or insights on this effort, post a comment or drop a note at rmerritt@techinsights.com.

Lou's views on links to use

2008-07-01T10:09:00.001-07:00

I had a chance to catch up recently with Lou Lenzi (pictured), a veteran consumer electronics designer who currently heads up product management for the accessories business at Audiovox. He talked about several interconnects he is using in his latest consumer products including HD-PLC, WiFi and CEA-909.

Audiovox is rolling out a $399 wireless HDMI connector for flat-screen TVs and projectors using HD-PLC, the powerline technology developed by Panasonic. Lenzi's team surveyed many options including competing powerline approaches, ultrawideband technology from Pulse~Link and Tzero and Amimon's WiFi derivative.

Powerline was the best bet for adding no new wires around the wall-mounted displays and projectors, Lenzi's team concluded. HD-PLC gave his systems a net 90 Mbits/s, less than the advertised 190 Mbits/s but plenty enough to support a 1080-progressive display.

"We looked at them all, and were very impressed by their 128-bit AES encryption which will play well with content owners," said Lenzi. "Their technology spans multiple circuit breakers, and they have an easy pairing method," he added.

The only downside for powerline in general is cost. "I'd like to see the modules get down to $49 to really take off. Right now they are at $99," he said.

Lenzi's group also makes a variety of universal remotes for which WiFi is becoming increasingly important. Startups ZeroG and G2 are doing a good job pushing down component prices to get WiFi into more systems such as remotes, he said.

Finally, Lenzi's big new product for the fall is an indoor flat antenna for over-the-air digital TV that can plug into any analog or HDTV. He estimates some 20 million U.S. homes use over-the-air as their primary TV source. Another 14 million use it for at least one TV in the home.

"That’s a big opportunity for us," with the cut-off of analog signals coming in February 2009, he said.

The antenna can deliver a crisper picture than satellite TV systems which typically compress signals down to a tight 7 Mbits/s. So, even some HDTV users may buy the antenna box to get the best reception for special events such as the Super Bowl.

"If you do a side-by-side comparison of high def from over-the-air versus cable or satellite you would be surprised at the difference," said Lenzi.

Audiovox has patented the layout for antenna plates it uses in its mini-pizza box unit. Lenzi said the new CEA-909 interface that lets users "steer" antennas by electrically exciting different combinations of the plates will be a key feature for an upcoming crop of DTV converter boxes. The interface will eventually appear on set-top boxes and DTVs, too.

I first met Lou perhaps more than a decade ago when he was designing PC-TV systems for Thomson. Times and technologies have changed quite a bit since then, but Lou remains an optimistic and innovative engineer at heart.

Thanks for hitting me!

2008-06-30T08:11:00.000-07:00

Somewhere along the line last week this little blog crossed 100,000 hits to date. I know that ain't much in these days of Web 2.0 mass market mania where everybody is angling for millions per week or day, but to this old-school print trade journalist who is still learning how to be a Webbie, it is amazing to think something done in my spare (!!) time has been viewed 100,000 times.

This milestone is especially gratifying given the fact I haven't been able to post daily for some time because I have been extra busy with other work stuff—and life stuff. So thanks, keep coming back and don't hesitate to provide feedback in a comment here or an email to rmerritt@techinsights.com

Is WiMax wobbly?

2008-06-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

A new Frost & Sullivan report suggesting WiMax is in trouble is getting some attention today, latching on to a broader debate my colleague Jack Shandle explored with his recent story on the outlook for harmonizing WiMax and LTE.

There’s been a fair bit of tit-for-tat between WiMax and LTE lately. A group of LTE assembled to drive interoperability testing today. Recently both LTE and WiMax backers created separate efforts to come to grips with patent issues.

One of the big proponents of WiMax has been Intel which has dangled the possibility of rolling a combo WiFi/WiMax chip set into future Centrino notebooks to kick start this market as it did 802.11. It will be well worth watching for any developments on this front at the big Intel event in August. Meanwhile, the debates rage on.

Making sense of sensor nets

2008-06-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

A brief trip to IEEE Secon raised more questions than answers for me about the status and outlook for wireless sensor networks.

A workshop on WiFi meshes suggested a few small companies are seeing some market traction with the technology despite the fact the 802.11s standard has gotten bogged down and there appears to be a lot of fundamental research still being worked out. Eric Brewer made it clear the technology has both huge potential and tremendous challenges in what is its potentially biggest market—getting the developing world on the Net.

A fire hose of a keynote from David Culler (pictured) raised other questions about work in the lower power, lower bandwidth 802.15.4 world. Here too it seems there are still unresolved standards and software issues for the industry, particularly around how meshes and routing are being defined. Culler’s efforts hold promise of a way forward, despite questions about what are the driving apps for sensor nets.

I suspect the apps are diverse ranging from the factory floor to health care at home, as Intel has shown. BTW, whatever happened to that national sensor net programs folks around the U.S. Homeland Security Department were talking about a few years ago?

Super story for GbE

2008-06-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Vendors cranked the volume on Infiniband at the International Supercomputing conference in Dresden this week with news on products from QLogic, Voltaire and a new roadmap for the IBTA. Likewise IB proponents were quick to jump on the bandwagon--along with AMD--for their part in the success of IBM’s Roadrunner cracking the petaflops barrier.

But an editor of the Top 500 list was quick to point out Gbit Ethernet still dominates the world’s biggest systems, appearing in 285 of the supers compared to just 120 for IB. The IB installations tended to be high-end academic machines while GbE was more often used in commercial systems, he added.

And as for AMD, despite its high profile appearance in Roadrunner, its presence has diminished in the latest Top 500, a casualty of its missteps and Intel’s success with quad-core chips.

On sensor nets and more

2008-06-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

I am headed to IEEE Secon next week, a technical ground zero for work on wireless sensor networks. I see participation in the event from a wide range of universities as well as top tier tech companies including Alca-Lu, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia.

From anyone engaged in the event or the sector, I’d love to hear what are you consider the key technology and market struggles as I get myself oriented to cover this event. Drop a comment here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com.

At an Intel Research event yesterday I heard a lot about wireless sensor nets for use in elder care, an emerging market Intel is trying to enable with its Shimmer sensors that currently use 802.15.4 and Bluetooth.

I also found out Intel is about to hand off to OEMs technology to create WiFi backhaul systems that can deliver 6 Mbits/s over 30 kilometers without using fancy high gain antennas or pushing the limits on regulatory power regimes. If they use better antennas and push power limits, they can send 4 Mbits across 100 km, said David Taylor (above right) who helped refine the software. The Intel technology involves software for a modified WiFi MAC protocol that uses slotted TDMA, enabling products that could be of use bringing the Web to the developing world.

Taylor was quick to point out the so-called Rural Connectivity Platform is a point-to-point link only and won’t compete with WiMax, Intel’s current wireless hobby horse. My view: between what WiFi and LTE will do, Intel would be better served to ease up on its whole WiMax religion—but that’s fodder for another story.

Here comes IOV

2008-06-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

I look forward to popping into the annual PCI SIG meeting in San Jose tomorrow and am already hearing significant news about the release of the IOV specs. It ain’t the full PCI Express for the embedded world that ASI hoped to be, but there is nevertheless real momentum to use the standard to further drive PCI Express into comms and embedded gear, so look out RapidIO.

If there are any other importat wrinkles in the Express world I need to know about—issues with Express 3.0 or whatever—now’s the time to chime in as I get ready to dive into this pool.

On difficult partnerships

2008-06-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Patrick Mannion of TechOnline for tipping me off this morning to the conflict over 60 GHz. I had no idea the 802.15.3c folks and the 802.11 VHT crowd were about to have a big powwow to figure out how to parse out separate standards in this spectrum peacefully.

Craig Mathias says there is plenty of room for multiple standards and product approaches in this promising area, so bring on the competition. I’d like to hear other opinions about multi-Gbit wireless nets so please chime in here or at rmerritt@techinsights.com.

What role do you think WiFi could play at 60 GHz, especially given the market lead SiBeam has with its .3c-like approach? Is there a real opportunity for the VHTL6 concept of an aggregate Gbit WiFi net at less than 6 MHz? And what does all this hubbub mean for Wireless USB and other ultrawideband wannabees?

And while you’re at it, what do you think of an Obama-Clinton ticket in 2008?

Will LSI buy Chelsio?

2008-06-02T15:37:00.000-07:00

It’s a reasonable speculation from where I sit in the blogosphere. In a recent interview with CEO Ahbi Talwalkar (left) I found out the company lacks standard Ethernet chips to support its nascent drive into networking, but it does has an investment in the startup that was early to the long-coming 10G party.

It’s clear a good 10G capability would be key for the company that wants to live sat the space where storage and networking meet. However, there are plenty of available startups out there, LSI has some custom capabilities that could spawn products and there is always the question of when the timing is right for the 10G ramp to really start.

I’m thinking pretty darn soon. But I’d love to hear any good insights you may have in a comment or at rbmerrit@cmp.com

PAN-ing for gold

2008-06-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

Startup Ozmo debuts today with a novel idea for scaling back Wi-Fi chips for personal-area net connections in mice, keyboards, headsets and more. Intel will enable these and other kinds of WiFi PANs under its Cliffside project as I noted below.

I talked with Todd Antes, vice president of marketing for Atheros recently about a low cost- .11n router design from the company. He said Atheros demonstrated a Cliffside like capability at CES last January, though he would not comment on whether the company has any chip in the works similar to those from Ozmo.

“Philosophically we believe in [WiFi PANs],” he said. “Notebooks are getting smaller, so it makes a lot of sense to let one radio accomplish more tasks,” he added.

WiFi uber alles

2008-05-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

I am playing catch up with Cliffside, an Intel project to put WiFi in the personal area network disclosed at IDF Shanghai. Turns out this work and another effort (stay tuned for a Monday story) has a lot of people excited about WiFi someday becoming the one radio you need to handle everything from mice to linking to the Net.

One of my fave wireless analysts, Craig Mathias, claims the time has come for WiFi PANs. "In a couple years a WiFi PAN business could be very successful," Mathias told me on the phone today. It won't kill Bluetooth--nothing dies in high tech--but it could stunt its long term growth worse than a bad cigarette habit.

Intel claims its technology can connect up to eight WiFi devices to a notebook on a PAN while the computer is on a WiFi LAN. The technology could improve the quality of media streamed between a computer and a TV or other display because it eliminates the latency of going through an access point.

The Cliffside program uses a modified Intel WiFi chip with additional buffers to rapidly switch between PAN and LAN modes and is expected to ship within 12 months, said Gary Martz, a marketing manager for the program. He said use will probably be limited to consumer notebooks for the first year or so.

"Corporate IT managers will probably have a heart attack, perceiving this as enabling notebooks to be a bunch of rouge access points that impact performance of their WiFi networks," Martz said.

Mathias was animated in his enthusiasm for WiFi. "WiFi's success is unquestionable. It will be in everything. Twenty years from now people will still be talking about WiFi."

Good, we tech reporters need the job security ;-)

Ethernet's puppy

2008-05-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

I haven't had my eye on the ball of the high-speed Ethernet standards effort over at the IEEE 802.3ba for awhile, so I talked to the chair of the committee, John D'Ambrosia late last week for an update. This is big complex stuff about the future of Ethernet, the data center and converged telecoms at mind-bending 40 and 100G speeds.

John reports all goes well with technical progress at the last meeting, as many as 200 expected at the next meeting and appropriate debates on the floor. I haven't heard much from the committee at large about this effort, so if you have some observations or opinions on this big leap forward post a comment or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com.

While this standard is gestating, John has a new puppy at home (pictured while snoozing) that is also growing fast. John says it's possible the .3ba work could be in an early draft stage by March and a late draft in November. By that time little Buster D'Ambrosia will be chomping down dog food at a 40 or maybe 100G rate.

Quick predictions on graphics

2008-05-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple days researching GDDR5 for an EE Times story last week. From what I learned, here are a few quick and free from-the-hip predictions. Take them for what they are worth.

--AMD will be the first to use GDDR5 on a new graphics controller to be announced soon.
--Archrival Nvidia will wait as long as possible before moving to GDDR5, opting to use the more economical GDDR3 at 1.3 GHz+ as long as possible
--Intel will use GDDR5 on its much-anticipated Larrabee controller when it debuts probably in late 2009, but the part won’t make that big of a splash in the market in its first generation.
--Rambus will struggle to get traction with XDR in HDTVs and elsewhere, crossing its fingers for better luck in next-generation videogame consoles with a second or third generation technology.

Think I'm wrong? Share a prediction of your own here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com. What to learn more? Check out this white paper.

China rising

2008-05-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

You get interesting glimpses into where a company is at trolling the job boards. I saw a recent ad for Hua Wei on the SI-List for an engineer that indictaed where this company is on its climb from a copier of Cisco products to an innovator of modest capabilities in its own right.

The ad called for an SI designer who ideally has "experience in taping out multi-million gate CMOS ASICs in 130nm technology and below." They are willing to take someone with no more than a bachelor's degree and two-years industry experience to handle "evaluation and choice of 3rd party IO buffer and SerDes IP for ASIC design."

Clearly, they are not at the exalted level of Cisco's 90nm Quantum Flow Processor or even its FCoE work, but few ASIC designers on the globe could pull off a design like that. Nevertheless, the China's answer to Cisco is clearly on the rise, and I'd like to—and expect to--hear more from them.

8G Fibre Channel heats up

2008-05-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

In the relatively slow and steady pace of the Fibre Channel world, competition is starting to heat up around the transition to 8 Gbit/s products. Storage switching giant Brocade rolled out its portfolio of 8G switches and server cards today.

Emulex was quick to point out it has been there, done that with server cards already qualified by EMC. Indeed both Emulex and QLogic were early to the 8G party with cards they rolled last summer.

Despite a little bit of temperatures rising, I recall what Renato Recio of IBM told me during an interview for a recent story about Fibre Channel over Ethernet. For users that what high performance and need to move this year FC is the safe bet, but for 2009 the FCoE community should have its ducks al in a row to be a solid competitor.

Ethernet gets green

2008-05-08T23:17:00.000-07:00

There's plenty of work to do at the IEEE 802.3az, but Intel's proposal for a low power idle version of Ethernet has already got the nod to be part of the group's spec for 100 Mbit and Gbit chips. The next big debate will be whether it or a Broadcom proposal for a so-called subset PHY wins out for 10 Gbit chips and for backplane Ethernet.

Next week's meeting is the final call for proposals, so if you have a hot idea for green Ethernet better find the meeting and come with Powerpoint in hand or forever hold your peace. I'd be happy to host a debate on the trade off between these two approaches if anyone wants to take one side or the other in comment posting here.

The Conexant/CopperGate connection

2008-05-07T17:59:00.000-07:00

No big surprise that Conexant sold off its powerline networking group today. Linking the dots on its future, it's not a big shocker HomePNA specialist CopperGate Communications was the buyer.

The Multimedia over Coax spec is Conexant's current direction in home nets these days. A Conexant exec told me at the MoCA conference last fall that Conexant plans to ship discrete MoCA RF and baseband chips in the second half of 2008, then follow them up with chips that integrate MoCA support as a block on its silicon for DSL, MPEG and passive optical network chips for set-tops, routers and optical network terminals.

Conexant and Broadcom both joined the MoCA board recently, telegraphing plans for MoCA silicon. Conexant had already given up on earlier plans to make HomePlug AV chips, believing the technology will have difficulty keeping pace with the bandwidth needs of digital media.

For its part, CopperGate is very bullish on the ITU's G.hn standard as part of its road to the future. CopperGate just announced it has delivered five million chips for HomePNA over phone and coax lines to date. It bought Connexant's powerline group so it could add to its mix that technology which European carriers demand.

Looking to the future, CopperGate foresees the day when a completed G.hn could allow it to deliver a chip that handles all three wired media in a standard way. The company also plans to offer chips that support G.hn as well as the version 4.0 of HomePNA now in progress. One chip, all home net markets--that's the Holy Grail.

I wonder why Conexant didn't see that broader win, hang on to its power line group and prepare for the same single-chip future.

RapidIO fans out

2008-05-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

Tom Cox pointed out to me that I missed a milestone back in February when RMI Corp. (formerly Raza Microelectronics) announced a processor for wireless base stations using a native serial RapidIO interface. It was the first MIPS chip with the interface that has previously been used in PowerPCs and DSPs.

No big surprise that anything linking into the wireless base station might go RIO, given the traction the group has gotten in DSP farms there with Ericsson, TI and others. But will the MIPS win expand beyond RMI?

Cox, executive director of the RIO trade group, suggests the right dynamics are in place. Cost reduction, the need for better communications links and the rise of multicore processors will drive out FPGA-based bridges in use today between MIPS chips and RIO farms, he said.

The RIO group has gotten several new members recently including Nortel and Qualcomm. No word on exactly what these folks are up to yet. If you have some insights, post a comment or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com

Waiting on Home Net 2010

2008-05-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Jockeying for position in the home network circa 2010 will be a major consumer sport with the HomeGrid Forum jumping into the fray. The players all will want to position themselves as the best solution for everyone from carriers to OEMs to consumers.

So far MoCA, HomePlug and HomePNA have been pretty quiet about their plans to leap toward the 400+ Mbits/s carriers are calling for in the next year or so. But everyone has heard that call including the HomeGrid folks who want to goose the G.hn effort to deliver that over coax as well as a reach goal of Gbit links when possible.

Writing an analysis of the latest news revealed a few interesting wrinkles. For example, the wired (MoCA, Powerline and HomePNA crew) represent just 19 percent of today's home nets which are dominated by WiFi and wired Ethernet. And most of HomePNA's installs are on coax, not phone lines.

To get one overarching standard will require a tussle between the big vendors who want a unified market and the small vendors with silicon skin in the game. Already Pulse~Link is suggesting G.hn should re-think its choice of OFDM (which it does not use), while HomePlug folk praise the group for the choice (because they made it, too).

Meanwhile the powerline folks at IEEE 1901 have yet to be able to muster support for a confirming vote on a HomePlug/Panasonic home net proposal. The vote was put off at meetings in October, December and March, but may come up in July. Not a good sign for consensus building in this community.

Holy Grail for home nets

2008-04-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

Could we be headed for one spec that delivers the best home networking over coax, phone or power lines? That's what they hope over at the HomeGrid Forum that launched yesterday with 11 members companies. They aim to accelerate work on the ITU-T G.hn standard-in-progress.

Turns out only a couple percent of the estimated 140 million home nets today use MoCA or HPNA and maybe 10 percent use some form of powerline, according to market gazers over at Parks Associates. It's mainly Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet at home today.

Still, it could be quite a boost for the industry to get behind one interoperable standard. I'm gathering opinions on this effort for a print wrap up story, so if you have something insightful to offer, drop a comment here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com. Can this work? Will people get behind it? What will it take? Sound off!