Alereon says they demonstrated 480 Mbps and 320 Mbps speeds using UWB and the MBOA specification this week in their lab: Alereon is working in the Wireless USB and UWB worlds, and is creating chips in compliance with the Multi-Band OFDM Alliance (MBOA) approach.
The MBOA left behind efforts at the IEEE 802.15.3a task group to form an IEEE standard. Freescale (a Motorola spinoff) is pushing the technology behind its XtremeSpectrum UWB acquisition. That technology uses a "classical" UWB approach versus MBOA's integration of a variety of wireless ideas into one standard that they say has a better chance of resulting in higher throughput. Freescale disputes this, and had tried in the past to get the MBOA approach ruled out of bounds by the FCC. The FCC essentially said it was fine.
The ultimate goal of the 802.15.3a task group was 480 Mbps at 10 meters; Alereon issued this press release to try to up the ante on its friendly and unfriendly competitors.
Press release follows this link:
Alereon First to Meet 480Mbps UWB Spec in Over-the-Air Demonstration
November 16, 2004 08:01 AM US Eastern Timezone
AUSTIN, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 16, 2004--Alereon, a leading fabless
semiconductor company developing wireless solutions for the Ultra Wideband
(UWB) and Wireless USB (WUSB) markets, today announced the world's first
over-the-air demonstration in compliance with the Multi-band OFDM Alliance
(MBOA) specification. Alereon demonstrated speeds of 480Mbps and 320Mbps in
their system lab this week.
Alereon's MBOA leadership and history of UWB development expertise put the
company in a position to quickly prove the capabilities of its chipsets once
the MBOA-SIG released its specification.
"It's not only encouraging, but truly exciting to see that immediately on
the heels of the initial release of the MBOA-SIG ultrawideband specification
we already have an over-the-air demonstration that meets the full 480Mbps
bandwidth," said Kurt Scherf, Vice President, Research, Parks & Associates.
"With the technology for WUSB moving forward at a rapid pace, we can be
confident that the industry will be able to move to market quickly."
"This demonstration is another example of Alereon's leadership position in
providing MBOA and WUSB silicon solutions," said Eric Broockman, chief
executive officer of Alereon. "Not only is Alereon the first company to
demonstrate both the mandatory 55Mbps to 200Mbps data rates of the MBOA UWB
specification, but we are also the first to demonstrate the more difficult
320 and 480 data rates. We believe this significant accomplishment gives our
customers a two and a half times speed advantage over other solutions, and a
five-time speed advantage over proprietary UWB solutions. In turn, we
believe our customers will enjoy a one-year time to market advantage for
higher speed applications by working with Alereon."
About Alereon Inc.
Alereon Inc. is a fables semiconductor company providing complete solutions
for wireless USB/MultiBand OFDM ultrawideband (UWB) applications. A
technology pioneer, Alereon holds the greatest number of UWB patents, was
first to demonstrate an entirely in-house designed UWB platform, co-founded
the MultiBand OFDM Alliance (MBOA) and WiMedia Alliance, and is
participating in the development of a wireless USB standard. Alereon's
products promise to replace the complex tangle of wiring used to
interconnect today's consumer electronics, computer peripheral, and mobile
devices with high-bandwidth, low-power, low-cost wireless links. Further
information is available on the company's website: www.alereon.com.