LAS VEGAS — The IEEE 802.15.3a task group on ultrawideband will likely vote this week in Hawaii on whether to disband. If the motion passes, three years of acrimonious debate over which form of UWB would best meet the task group's requirements will come to an end. And the fight for a 480-Mbit/second short-range wireless interface will be renewed in the marketplace, opening the door to multiple competing forms of UWB.
While various proposals for an interface were put forward after the initial call for proposals at the end of 2002, the roster quickly got whittled down to two: Freescale Semiconductor Inc.'s direct-sequence UWB and the WiMedia Alliance's multiband orthogonal frequency- division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) alternative. And there consensus ended.
Since mid-2003, the two camps have traded blows around the world, in meeting after meeting. Neither side has been capable of gaining sufficient momentum to achieve the 75 percent majority needed for confirmation, although each has held the lead at various times.
In the interim, Pulse-Link Inc. (Carlsbad, Calif.) introduced its own form of UWB and has tried repeatedly to broker a compromise. Its Common Signaling Mode allows the various forms of UWB to coexist. But the WiMedia Alliance was adamant: To avoid customer confusion, there should be only one UWB implementation, the group said.
With no end in sight and hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted on travel, the task group has had enough.
"The only ones benefiting from all this are the airlines and the hotels," said Yoram Solomon, director of strategic marketing and industry relations for Texas Instruments Inc.'s Mobile Connectivity Solutions Division, speaking on a UWB panel at last week's IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference here.
TI is one of the main backers of MB-OFDM, along with Intel, Staccato Communications, Wisair and a host of consumer electronics companies. Nodding in agreement was Martin Rofheart, director of UWB operations for Freescale (Vienna, Va.). Making a point of saying they were speaking only for themselves and not for their respective camps, Solomon and Rofheart agreed on one thing: It's time to call a halt to the waste of valuable engineering resources and let the market decide which form is better.
Speaking on the same panel, John Santhoff, chief technology officer at Pulse-Link, then noted, "It takes a 75 percent majority to disband — and we've never been able to get a 75 percent majority on anything." Santhoff said he personally would still like to see a compromise hammered out and a standard formed.
