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MultiBand OFDM Alliance SIG Announces Completion and Availability of Ultrawideband Specifications to Members (18/11/2004)

Achievement enables MBOA-SIG members to finalize standards-based ultrawideband (UWB) chip designs which will ensure industry-wide interoperability and ease-of-use for future UWB products

The MultiBand OFDM Alliance Special Interest Group (MBOA-SIG) announced today at a press conference here that it has completed its physical layer (PHY) 1.0 specifications and is making these available to MBOA-SIG Promoter, Contributor and Adopter members. This move enables the MBOA members, who include many of the leading consumer electronics, personal computing, mobile phone and semiconductor companies, to finalize their standards-based ultrawideband chip and board-level designs. The issuance of the MBOA 1.0 specifications is particularly important to the more than 16 silicon developers, who are now developing customer samples, and will result in pre-production interoperability testing. All this activity, in turn, will ensure that future UWB products from multiple vendors will communicate with each other quickly and easily.

"This achievement by the MBOA-SIG is the result of over 100 engineers from more than 50 companies working together to create these specs. Altogether, more than 200,000 engineer man-hours and an unrelenting peer review process have yielded a rock-solid specification," said Stephen Wood, strategic marketing manager with Intel's R&D division and a member of the MBOA-SIG steering committee. "We are proceeding rapidly to ensure interoperable consumer products in mass production."

The MBOA-SIG has established a very extensive ecosystem of valuable companies throughout the value-chain and is working in close association with the WiMedia Alliance, the Wireless USB Promoter Group, and the 1394 Trade Association to bring a variety of interoperable products to market in 2005. Application targets range from Wireless USB and Wireless 1394 for PCs, printers, cameras, and other peripherals, to streaming video for PVRs, displays, and other consumer devices, as well as high-speed IP connections via the WiMedia WiNet PAL.

"This is definitely a milestone that has been achieved quicker than expected," said Joyce Putscher, director at market research firm In-Stat/MDR. "This progress bodes well for the efforts underway to complete the Wireless USB specification, since WUSB will demand much from the MBOA specifications."

Concurrent to these activities, the MBOA-SIG has been moving forward in its organizational efforts and has created four levels of membership: Promoter, Contributor, Adopter and Supporter. The MBOA-SIG has nearly one dozen committees covering PHY and MAC technical development and specification creation, worldwide regulatory advancement, and marketing. Promoter members are those members who additionally serve on the Steering Committee and include: Alereon, Hewlett Packard, Intel Corporation, Nokia, Panasonic, Philips Electronics, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Staccato Communications, ST Microelectronics, Texas Instruments and Wisair. In brief, Contributors help design the specifications in technical committees; Adopters receive final specifications; and Supporters are kept apprised of MBOA activities.

About UWB

Ultrawideband (UWB) is a wireless communications technology that operates in a newly allocated unlicensed spectrum. Advantages of UWB include low power consumption, very low cost/complexity with high data rates (640 Mbps over-the-air) and precision location capability. UWB specifications target emerging wireless personal area network (WPAN) communications. WPAN technology enables high-speed, short-range, cable-free connectivity for a wide array of multimedia consumer electronics, PC peripherals and mobile devices, including wireless USB, wireless 1394 and the emerging Wireless UPnP/IP protocols.

www.usb.org/wusb/home
www.multibandofdm.org