Conquering the Last Inch

August / September 2010 By: Shahin Farshchi Volume 8 Number 4

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The rise, fall and reinvention of short-range, high-speed wireless connectivity

Although the popular fast-food option, “Supersize me,” may make some cringe at the thought of clogged arteries, consumers aren’t shy about their ever-increasing appetite for high-definition (HD) content and storage on an ever-expanding array of portable devices. The 21st century started with double-digit megabytes of portable storage as luxury items and a handful of high-definition movie titles and televisions to view them on. Persistent transistor scaling has put tens of gigabytes of storage capacity on most of our portable media devices and phones. Blue-ray lasers and inexpensive LCD TV manufacturing have relegated their non-HD counterparts to the sub-par status black-and-white experienced in the 70s. Unfortunately, the means to effectively transfer the content from disks and media players to displays or other portable devices, without clumsy cables, has remained elusive.
History has shown that consumers have embraced means of un-tethering applications ranging from the iconic remote controls, garage-door openers, Bluetooth phone headsets, and wireless local-area networks.

One challenge is wireless real estate—RF bandwidth, to be exact. More than half a century ago, mathematician Claude Shannon postulated that the amount of data you can move over a channel is proportional to the bandwidth and inversely proportional to the noise on the channel. With the FCC managing the amount of bandwidth available to a host of uses, ranging from military and medical to radio and television, a large swath for moving HD movies at super-high speeds was hard to come by.
In the mid-90s, scientists chose to use a scheme called “Ultra Wideband” (UWB) which communicated literally under the noise floor over short distances over a frequency band that was already earmarked for other uses. In effect, it “whispered” under the “conversations” of other transceivers.

Several groups of talented scientists chose to form companies to implement ultra wideband transceivers using standard silicon technologies—which was a huge technical challenge. Taking a lesson from the wild success of WiFi, engineers, investors and large companies like Samsung, Intel and Motorola, lined up to fund startups like Staccato, Wilinx, T-Zero, Wisair, Alereon, Artimi, WiQuest and others. The goal was to enable the wireless streaming of high-def audio, video and data.
This caught the attention of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, whose existing personal area network devices were getting long in the tooth and too slow to do much more than wireless headsets.
But alas, interoperability issues led Bluetooth to pursue a more tried-and-true alternative based on WiFi. Eventually, fatigued investors and corporate sponsors decided to pull the plug in late 2008, knowing that modern WiFi will live up to delivering a portion of UWBs performance without the interoperability issues. Separately, Intel has rolled out the Wireless Display feature, or WiDi, to its Intel Core processor family that also uses WiFi radios to wirelessly deliver video with modest quality—primarily due to bandwidth limitations.

So where would one turn to experience true HD without the hassle and clutter of wires? Some visionaries saw the answer in the 60-GHz band, which offers wide swaths of bandwidth that are relatively unoccupied. Radios that operate in the 60-GHz band are expensive and only communicate in line of sight, making them more suitable for limited infrastructure rather than mainstream consumer applications. Earlier in the decade, scientists at UC Berkeley took on the extreme challenge of building 60-GHz radios using inexpensive silicon technologies.

The significant challenges are that 1) it is very difficult to generate 60-GHz signals in silicon, 2) those signals then tend to get absorbed in silicon and 3) the “beam” must be “steered” towards the receiver in the presence of blocking objects that move. The Berkeley scientists developed special tools to model electromagnetic effects at the nanoscale in silicon, thereby building new integrated nanostructures in silicon that serve as the active (e.g. transistors) and passive (e.g. antennas and inductors) components of the radio. Furthermore, sophisticated beam-forming algorithms were coupled to modern computing power to actively steer the beam to the receiver in the presence of moving, blocking objects.

The Berkeley effort was later spun out into a company called SiBEAM (full disclosure: my venture firm Lux Capital is an investor), whose wireless HDMI adaptor has since been introduced in LG, Panasonic and Vizio products to help make them thinner and freeing their owners from the clutter of cables. Also, Israeli startup Wilocity is developing 60-GHz transceivers of its own to take wireless communications to the next level: inside the computer. Wilocity’s goal is to liberate the computer from the “box” and turn it into a collection of interchangeable modules that process data, render high-quality video, store data, display, and provide human interfaces.

The efforts leading to the ability to wirelessly stream and manage HD content came after nearly a decade of effort and hundreds of millions of invested dollars. This is yet another example of the exponentially increasing challenges that scientists and investors face as they push the technology envelope. However, the great minds will use the ever-improving development tools that are being made available to innovate their way towards solving the next great problem—and investors’ checkbooks will continue to be open to support their efforts.

Shahin Farshchi, Ph.D. is a senior associate at Lux Capital Management, a New York investment firm.