UWB Market Report Forecasts Ultimate Techno Domination

Advanced Strategies for Integrated Solutions, Inc. (AsIs) today released a quarterly market report update forcasting the Ultra Wideband (UWB) Component Market. According to the report, UWB technology will reach ubiquity in local area networks and personal area networks in the next 5-7 years. Further, the report predicts that UWB will penetrate wide area network (WAN) markets using ad-hoc or managed mesh networks, and eventually make competing technologies like WCDMA and GPRS obsolete.

WAN communications devices represent the largest segment in the report. They are forecast to exceed 59 million units by 2007. AsIs predicts that UWB has the potential to become the dominant technology in wireless PANs, LANs, and WANs. According to the company, the primary limiting factor to UWB’s dominance in the worldwide WAN is a unification of global wireless spectrum allocation standards.

According to AsIs, the physical attributes of UWB are key to its potential for success. The objections being raised against the adoption of UWB into the market include security, interference, cost, and market differentiation. AsIs pointed out that these are issues that have also been raised by the same or similar groups in the last decade as WiFi, Bluetooth, and other wireless technologies emerged into the marketplace.

Regarding security, AsIs pointed out that UWB is one of the most effectively-suited wireless technologies for wireless data transmissions since it uses time-shift and phase-shift modulation encryption techniques. In addressing UWB’s interference potential in crowded areas or in the presence of other wireless emissions, the report highlighted the fact that the inherent physics behind UWB can eliminate most issues with what it referred to as “simple inexpensive solutions.” Such adjustments, according to AsIs, do not significantly impact the chip cost, since that cost is limited only by the die size, which is directly proportional to the number of transistors on the circuit. UWB circuitry eliminates the complicated, transistor-rich components, such as the mixer, required in competing technologies that equates to a die size of 0.1 mm2.

The AsIs report also pointed to a recent UWB demo by XtremeSpectrum in which 6 simultaneous video streams were transmitted using a single UWB device in a room containing operational 802.11 radios; despite this close proximity, no interference was observed. The result clearly refutes the interference issue in a residential gateway application and in addition underscores a clear market advantage of UWB over any existing wireless technology: its speed.