Ultra Wideband on High Speed Wireless Personal Area Networks

The benefits of an increasingly mobile lifestyle introduced by wireless technologies in cell phones and home PCs have resulted in greater demand for the same benefits in other consumer devices. Consumers enjoy the increased convenience of wireless connectivity. They will soon demand it for their video recording and storage devices, for real-time audio and video (AV) streaming, interactive gaming, and AV conferencing services as the need for digital media becomes more predominate in the home. Many technologies used in the digital home, such as digital video and audio streaming, require high bandwidth connections to communicate. Considering the number of devices used throughout the digital home, the bandwidth demand for wireless connectivity among these devices becomes very large indeed. The wireless networking technologies developed for wirelessly connecting PCs, such as Wi-Fi* and Bluetooth* Technology, are not optimized for multiple high-bandwidth usage models of the digital home. Although data rates can reach 54 Mbps for Wi-Fi, for example, the technology has limitations in a consumer electronics environment, including power consumption and bandwidth. When it comes to connecting multiple consumer electronics (CE) devices in a short-range network, or WPAN, a wireless technology needs to support multiple high data rate streams, consume very little power, and maintain low cost, while sometimes fitting into a very small physical package, such as PDA or cell phone. The emerging UWB wireless technology and silicon developed for UWB applications offer a compelling solution. This paper describes UWB technology and presents potential applications for UWB technology for use in WPANs in the digital home.