UWB at CES

Yesterday I wrote some general comments about CES. Today I’m going to focus on what I saw regarding UWB at CES. The MBOA Forum had a pavilion with many member companies participating. The DS UWB group seemed to be centered in the FreeScale booth. Both groups stressed the ability to stream two HDTV channels simultaneously from the same media source. FreeScale even had multiple demos of this running in the ESPN lounge.

The demos I saw in the MBOA Forum pavilion tended to use engineering boards with multiple components. This reminded me of the demos I saw at Bluetooth events in the late 90’s before form factor silicon was produced. Numerous people told me their goal was to have the first wireless USB chips ready in early early 2006, certification later that year and products by the end of 2006. If what was shown in the pavilion is the current state of the silicon I think that is a very ambitious schedule.

Freescale displayed silicon in a mini-PCI form factor. This was used in two PCs to exchange files as well as the media center demo mentioned above. Freescale also had a demonstration of a mobile phone sending a picture to a PC. However, the UWB radio on the phone didn’t appear to use that chip as it was much bigger. Perhaps it did and the extra size was battery. I’m not sure.

I found it very interesting that these organizations are articulating many of the same usage scenarios as Bluetooth is used for today. (Bluetooth can not do HDTV streaming.) The thinking is that the extra speed simply makes the better. That said, I think UWB will probably follow a similar adoption path that Bluetooth did. They still need to agree upon a standard or have two, world wide regulatory approval needs to be achieved; a good service discovery model needs to be in place, etc. These are all issues that Bluetooth has already dealt with and will be required for UWB to be successful. I think UWB can learn a great deal from the experiences of Bluetooth. I’ll have to think further about how this could be done.