Taipei, Taiwan -- Designers of ultrawide- band devices ran into a buzz saw of complaints over performance and pricing at last week's Computex trade show here, but chip makers insist they can address most concerns by year's end.
Prices will likely drop by half during the next 12 months, especially as some second-generation products migrate into single chips. IC designer Artimi Inc. is promising that $99 dongle and hub packages will be on retail shelves by the end of the year. Others say their devices will be available by the end of the first quarter.
"Ninety-nine dollars is a no-brainer point, where you put two of those things in a blister pack and hang it by the register. People will see it and be willing to buy it," said Artimi CEO Colin Macnab.
Boosting performance for early users of wireless Universal Serial Bus add-on peripherals may be another matter. "The biggest challenge to the add-ons is that you are going through a wired USB software architecture, which sucketh greatly," Macnab said.
That about summed up the feedback on the show floor. Most demos only achieved about 30 to 50 Mbits/second of throughput, well off the 150 to 200 Mbits that can be squeezed out of a 480-Mbit/s physical layer. "Chip set vendors cannot reach the speeds that users expect," said Kevin Chiu, a product line manager at Gemtek Technology Co., a major peripherals maker in Taiwan.
Chip makers say forthcoming second-generation products routing through legacy USB connectors will be able to hit 70 to 120 Mbits/s. Artimi demonstrated a chip set that hit the high end of that range.
"When PC makers embed the PCI Express module in the laptop, probably in Q1 or Q2, then we will see more than 100 Mbits," predicted Phil Yang, director of the UWB business unit at Realtek Semiconductor Corp. "There's too much overhead in the wired USB protocols, and that's tough to deal with. Once it moves onto PCI, Secure Digital I/O or a native interface, performance improves."
A couple of ultrawideband designers rolled out chips or tipped plans for forthcoming devices at the show. The Gen 2 products address concerns ranging from performance and die size to power dissipation--important for cell phone designs--and the thorny issue of scattered UWB spectrum across the globe.
First-generation chips supported only one of six frequency bands used globally. At roughly 3.1 GHz to 4.7 GHz, they were suitable for use in the United States, but Europe, Japan, South Korea and China don't allow UWB use in that band. And the Bluetooth 3.0 spec, which will run over UWB, operates in the higher-frequency band, starting at 6.3 GHz.
Consequently, chip makers have had to design in multiband support. Alereon, Inc. released its AL5000 chip set, which supports all six frequency band groups from 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz and is ready for use with next-generation Bluetooth. It will sample this month, and evaluation boards will ship in the third quarter.
Realtek Semiconductor Corp. is close to sampling its single-chip RTU7105, which supports band groups 1 and 3 and targets peripherals such as cameras and printers.
Staccato Communications released some details about its single-chip SC4000, which supports all six frequency groups. It will sample in October and promises a sub-$10 price by year's end and under $5 by mid-2008. "This is a commodity play. The whole point is volume. We want to get to a low price and sell billions," said Martyn Humphries, vice president of worldwide sales for Staccato.
A few notebook makers, including Toshiba, Lenovo, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, are expected to embed wireless USB this year. But most chip makers don't believe the market will take off until next year, when chip prices drop below $5 and the market migrates toward one-chip solutions.
Market researcher In-Stat estimates the wireless USB market will be $3 million this year, $35 million next year and $147 million by 2009. Around that time, cell phones with wireless USB will emerge, said Staccato's Humphries.
He believes size and power issues are holding handset designers back, but advanced manufacturing should address those concerns. "To go inside a handset, you've got to be in the 65-nanometer game," he said.
