How's this going to happen? That's the vision and practice of the UWB Forum, an industry alliance of over 85 companies from consumer electronics to cellular to silicon to applications. Not only is Direct-Sequence Ultra-Wideband (DS-UWB) technology here today in chipsets and ready-for-integration modules, but is being incorporated even as we speak into all of these consumer applications. Low-power and cost-effective yet incredibly fast and precise, DS-UWB meets the needs of today's markets as well as having a robust and achievable roadmap to data rates that go way beyond even the internal bus speeds of most personal computers.

With the advent of small, powerful, handheld devices—such as PDAs and smartphones, MP3 players, and personal video players—that personal universe is starting to transition from science fiction to fact. Gone are the days when much of your content needs to be chained immovably to the overweight and sedentary PC in the home office or to the stack of CDs, DVDs, and VHS tapes wherever they might be misplaced. The early devices in the market still have insufficient memory to really make that personal universe as complete as you'd like, but with the availability of 512 MB and 1 GB SDIO cards, as well as 4 GB micro disk drives that double in size each year, you can begin to see that universe from where you stand today.

All it takes is memory, a lot of it. A DVD-quality standard definition video runs upwards of 5 Mbps using best quality. That means that a feature-length motion picture could be over 4 GB of data. Music CDs ripped at the good quality level of 256 kbps make for 90 MB volumes. Carrying around a dozen or so of your favorite CDs is well over 1 GB of storage. A half-hour HD-quality TV show that you missed the night before because you were coaching your kid's softball team makes for a file that could be on the order of 1 GB or so. A GB here, a GB there, soon you're talking real storage challenges! So we can start to see a world, maybe a year or so in the future, where that personal universe (your five favorite movies, top 50 CDs, all the TV shows you missed last week because you were in Europe, and all the files that you care about on your computer) can rapidly consume 20 GB of storage to make them a part of that personal universe. And this is only the beginning.

But first, a word on file size and compression: compression is a necessary evil. Even the CD is only an approximation of the real thing, albeit a very good one, good enough that for 99.5% of the world it works as well as the analog thing itself (only the folks with 50 kg granite turntables and tube amps might beg to differ with me). However, we've all seen the progression over the past few years on MP3 file size, from 64 and 96 kbps back in 2001 to 256 and 320 kbps versions of the same tunes now. Why? Storage costs have plummeted, making it so much easier to maintain very high fidelity recording rather than sacrificing it because of the size of the disk drive. It's still a nuisance to rip a CD and reduce that file to the MP3 version; wouldn't it be great to get rid of that annoying step by having memory so cheap that you could use the native CD format file itself? Right there we go from that 90 MB of memory right back up to the 600 MB of the original CD.

The same issue occurs in multimedia entertainment, but those potential file sizes still require the more lossy compressions we all suffered with the 2001-vintage MP3s. There are those who believe that consumers will "get used" to the compression, especially in portable devices where screen size and resolution is more limited; I've got to point out, though, that a VGA screen (already available in some handheld products) is out-of-the-box better than SDTV, and the megapixel cameras built into mobile phones are already as good as HDTV. Content file size will grow just as fast as the available memory, and compression is the stop gap. Given the path that consumers followed with MP3s, it seems a little naive to imagine that the very same won't happen with multimedia.

Why this long discussion of multimedia file size, storage costs, and compression? Because, for my portable universe to happen, there has to be a seamless way for that content to move back and forth between the handheld device and the fixed universe, whether it's your home, office, or friends. This transfer needs to have a number of important characteristics:

• Extremely good DC power efficiency per bit transferred
• Gigabit per second speeds to make a multi-GB transfer time-efficient
• Ease of use and high levels of industry-specified interoperability
• A compelling price point that makes it affordable to put in even a $200 smartphone or PDA.

Products utilizing DS-UWB technology are an ideal fit for multimedia, high-speed, high Quality-of-Service connectivity applications. Other flavors of UWB are more limited, power-hungry, whiteboard approaches, and none of these have seen the light of day; at best, real production (not "test", or "demonstration", or whatever other marketing euphemism chosen). DS-UWB brings native, compelling flexibility to its users. True to the rule and spirit of the U.S. FCC's 2002 Report and Order, DS-UWB occupies as much instantaneous bandwidth as practical in order to be impervious to multipath fading while also demonstrating the low-interference, high-coexistence characteristics that only true UWB can provide.

The UWB Forum has dedicated itself to this vision of the future just around the corner. The world where you can miss your favorite TV show because you were at your kid's soccer game, using your smartphone to video the highlights of the game in HD-resolution quality, then upon walking in the front door at home, have the captured video file transferred securely and automatically to the home multimedia gateway/personal video recorder, e-mailed to the grandparents, and served up on the big screen in the den, while simultaneously getting the two TV shows you missed as well as a dozen new tunes and the newest blockbuster deposited securely and seamlessly into that smartphone. Wow—that's many GB of data transfer, and all for a few mAh of battery power, and all in seconds. That's what UWB brings, and it brings it now.

The UWB Forum has learned from the successes and failures of that which has come before—the most appropriate example is Bluetooth technology, which promised so much and suffered the hype for years before the first practical silicon solutions were available. Bluetooth developers had the right idea, that people wanted a cloud of personal connectivity that stayed centered on the user. The Bluetooth SIG also recognized the need for end-to-end guidance of the development process, from the silicon devices all the way to the end application, and making sure that there was provision for interoperability testing and product certification—the challenge they failed at was concentration on "doing one thing well," instead creating new profiles and product spaces faster than they could get all the bugs out of the solution. Interoperability suffered initially, souring many potential users of the technology. Even today, it's still not a connectivity mechanism for the faint of heart.

The Bluetooth SIG was broadsided with the geometric growth in data storage volume in the very handheld devices for which the technology was destined; Bluetooth wireless connectivity at well under a megabit per second couldn't keep up with the flood of data that these devices could handle or generate. In addition, while it was DC-power-efficient enough for the occasional data transfer or low-data rate cell phone headset application, it fared badly when required to transfer even that single music album, where the power consumption can be 20% of the entire battery energy available (besides taking nearly a half-hour to do so). Do that a few times, and suddenly that mobile phone was out of power just when you needed it most.

On the other hand, the Wi-Fi Alliance took an IEEE success, IEEE 802.11, and ran with it, reaping all the benefits from the fact that 802.11 was designed to do one thing very well, and that was wireless Ethernet. Low on the radar for years before the enterprise started adopting it and later the consumer, Wi-Fi technology was able to debut with a modicum of success, primarily due to the fact that one Wi-Fi certified device could most likely interoperate with another, due in no small part to the underlying IEEE specification.

DS-UWB provides a strong and compelling roadmap to extreme speeds and very low cost solutions that are compatible with the multimedia handheld, mobile, and fixed product spaces. It relies upon a well understood IEEE media access control standard, IEEE 802.15.3, developed specifically for high Quality-of-Service, multimedia applications, and adds the robustness of the DS-UWB approach being proposed for the IEEE 802.15.3a physical layer. In addition, the approach to DS-UWB espoused by the UWB Forum provides for a coexistence mechanism called the Common Signaling Mode, which allows different flavors of UWB a chance to interact with or avoid one another as might be required in the home or workplace.

DS-UWB is the only commercial communications UWB technology with products that have been type-certified by the FCC. This means that DS-UWB based products can be developed and sold in the large U.S. market space now. What about the rest of the world? Right now, no other countries' regulatory bodies have approved general usage of UWB, though lots of behind-the-scenes work is being done right now to educate regulatory bodies about the exciting utility of UWB while working with those bodies to demonstrate the level of achievable coexistence. As things stand, we may see DS-UWB approved in technology-rich Asian countries in the next year, while the broad Europe market might take a little longer.

The UWB Forum has member companies in all parts of the UWB food chain, from silicon to applications. The silicon is real and available today, and the roadmap to screamingly high data rates is practical and well aligned with the highly flexible DS-UWB technology. The final product interoperability and certification test programs are part of their charter. Working cooperatively to reshape the worldwide regulatory environment to be conducive to DS-UWB is a significant part of the organization's effort. The UWB Forum wants you to be able to have your personal theme song, movie, or book wherever you go, to be able to maintain that personal universe without killing your batteries or pocketbook.