Posted on Friday, October 08, 2004 - 01:21 pm:

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quote:

http://www.commsdesign.com/news/market_news/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=49400445

Focus partners with Cadence on enhanced UWB for video
By Patrick Mannion

EE Times
Oct 04, 2004


MANHASSET, N.Y. — Focus Enhancements announced plans on Monday (Oct.
4) to partner with Cadence Design Systems to provide design services
for Focus's proprietary ultrawideband chips.

Focus (Campbell, Calif.) is aiming specifically at video distribution
market, and said it is currently demonstrating an implementation in
FPGAs that enables through-wall wireless transmissions at raw rates
of 216 Mbits/s at distances of up to 20 meters.

While the company said its technology is proprietary, it has been a
member of the Multiband-OFDM Alliance for some time. It also supports
the Alliance's special interest group. Focus said its ICs will
conform to MBOA UWB standards, adding that its performance will be
scaleable and provide nearly twice the bandwidth and transmission
distance criteria set forth by MBOA and the IEEE 802.15.3a UWB task
group. That task group's target is 110 Mbits/s at 10 meters and 480
Mbits/s at 1 meter. However, according to Brett Moyer, the company's
chief executive officer, Focus is aiming for 20 meters with rates of
100 Mbits/s and a bit error rate of 10-9. "We intend to enable four
high-definition compressed TV channels of video from a PVR [personal
video recorder], set-top box or media gateway," he said.

To enhance the distance and data-rate features of its chip sets,
Focus has incorporated enhancements to the MBOA physical layer (PHY)
while remaining compliant with the radio. According to Tom Hamilton,
executive vice president and general manager of the company's
semiconductor group (Hillsboro, Ore.), the final implementation will
use a dual-PHY approach with a Turbo mode on top of the MBOA-
compliant PHY.

Neither Moyer nor Hamilton would elaborate on the enhancements over
the MBOA design, but Hamilton did say the Turbo mode will again be
based on orthogonal frequency division multiplexing but use
precomputed symbols and a polyphase filter instead of the fast
Fourier and inverse Fourier transforms used on the MBOA radio.

With Cadence providing design services, Focus also anticipates using
Jazz Semiconductor and its SiGe BiCMOS technology to manufacture the
RF and mixed-signal portion of its chip set. The company has only
recently received a proposal from Jazz. Taiwan Semiconductor
Manufacturing Co. Ltd. will manufacture the digital baseband ASIC
side.

"These arrangements mark a significant milestone in our initiative to
become a global provider of UWB ICs that will deliver wireless video
throughout the home," said Moyer, adding that sampling will begin by
mid-2005. Production is expected to begin by the end of 2005. "These
are not for Christmas 2005," he said.

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