Race for the 5Gbps wireless LAN heats up

Stuart Corner
Friday, 12 December 2008 01:22

Business IT - Technology

With the increasing popularity of high definition video and multimedia today's wireless local area networks just won't be fast enough and work is well advanced to develop technologies with throughputs of 5Gbps operating at frequencies around 60GHz. Australia's NICTA is a lead player, but competition is heating up.

Standards body Ecma International this week published its 60GHz standard for short range unlicensed communications as ECMA-387 (available on the ECMA website as free download). It is the latest of several emerging standards for this frequency vying for acceptance and, ultimately commercial success.

According to ECMA "The standard provides high rate wireless personal area network (including point-to-point) transport for bulk data transfer and multimedia streaming." It is being submitted to the for fast track approval as ISO/IEC Standard.

The standard has been implemented in a singe CMOS chip developed by The Georgia Electronic Design Centre (GEDC) and Ecma says its members have already demonstrated its performance.

"The 60GHz radio transferred 200 megabyte sized data and image files - literally in less than a second - whereas up to now other wireless technologies took minutes. The same 60GHz radios demonstrated high definition uncompressed video streaming (also known as 720p/1080i) at multi-gigabit data rates."

According to GEDC director Dr Joy Laskar, "The combination of a very low power multi-gigabit 60GHz CMOS wireless solution and the enormous unlicensed bandwidth makes the imminent application of 60GHz technology in the consumer electronic marketplace possible. It enables a whole range of new consumer and business applications at the intersection of gaming and connectivity."

However the Ecma standard, and GEDC are facing competition from other standards and from other chip makers notably Australia's NICTA. iTWire reported in February 2008 NICTA's claim to have developed the world's first 60GHz CMOS WLAN chip.

Project leader, professor Stan Skafidas, said the chip was the result of a three-year research effort and involved a close collaboration with leaders in the global semiconductor industry. He explained that the major breakthrough achieved by NICTA was not the 60GHz operating frequency of the device but the fact that it had been fabricated in CMOS technology, which could reduce chip costs to about $10 in large scale production.

He told iTWire this week that announcement of the GEDC chip and the Ecma standard meant that competition was intensifying.

Skafidas said in February that NICTA hoped to have commercial samples of its chips in the first quarter of 2009 and estimated that wireless networking products incorporating them could be available in shops in about three years.
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