The long awaited wireless delivery of video in the home is nearly here. With many potential suitors in the Ultra-Wideband (UWB) community as well as the 802.11n crowd, we should see some real wireless video consumer products by Christmas. Which technology will win the wireless video delivery wars? Tzero Technologies is betting that its latest UWB chip set will capture a big chunk of that market.
The Tzero TZ7000 chip set includes the TZ7110 integrated baseband mixed-signal system-on-a-chip (SoC), which includes the physical-layer and MAC-layer (media-access control) circuitry. The TZ7210 is the UWB radio chip. The set conforms to the WiMedia Alliance version of UWB based on orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). It complies with the WiMedia standard and is interoperable with all other WiMedia-certified devices.
However, the Tzero chip set also incorporates a secret ingredient—a two-channel radio that brings multiple-input/multiple-output (MIMO) to UWB. Called UltraMIMO, this feature increases communications range, boosts link reliability, increases through-wall performance, and helps cancel interference.
WiMedia UWB’s general delivery specification is a minimum of 100 Mbits/s at 10 m and up to 480 Mbits/s at 2 m, both with total line-of-sight (LOS) visibility. Tzero beats that with a non-LOS 480-Mbit/s range at more than 5 m and non-LOS 106.7 Mbits/s at more than 20 m, both with 99% link reliability and less than one MPEG packet error in greater than 2 hours of video.
Tzero claims to meet or exceed the requirements for consumer electronics set forth by Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, and Sharp during a 2003 IEEE presentation. The company also offers a complete UWB Mini-PCI reference design that will speed the time-to-market of UWB audio/video systems. Production quantities and the reference design are available now.
Tzero Technologies Inc.
www.tzti.com