LONDON — Motorola Inc., an early investor in ultrawideband (UWB) chip pioneer XtremeSpectrum Inc. said Monday (Nov. 10) it is buying the privately-held company for an undisclosed sum. The deal is expected to close this week.
Motorola is the leading proponent of XtremeSpectrum's single-band, direct-sequence CDMA technology for the physical layer interface used in UWB devices. Motorola and XtremeSpectrum (Vienna, Va.) have joined ParthusCeva and Oki to promote the technology within the IEEE 802.15.3a task force group. A competing proposal based on a multiband frequency hopping approach is backed by nearly 20 semiconductor and consumer electronics companies, including Intel and Texas Instruments.
XtremeSpectrum was founded in November 1998. So far, it has invested about $42 million on its direct-sequence approach for the UWB physical interface. Investors also include Texas Instruments and Cisco Systems.
XtremeSpectrum is one of the few companies to actually delivered a chip for consumer UWB applications. Its Trinity devices has been integrated into several multimedia platforms, including Samsung's.
Motorola is already working closely with customers to embed the technology into an array of consumer products for demonstration by the end of the year.
The deal comes on the heels of XtremeSpectrum's filing a letter of intent with the IEEE confirming that, if accepted, it would be willing to grant royalty-free licenses for its technology to others in return for a similar royalty-free license.
The company said such cross-licensing deals would speed the acceptance and deployment of UWB. The IEEE group is meeting this week (Nov. 10-14) in Albuquerque, N.M, to forge a UWB standard.
