CES: Ultrawideband debuts in laptops and HDTVs

By Paul Trotter in Las Vegas

Posted on 7 Jan 2005 at 09:44

Ultrawideband (UWB) is the latest wireless specification to force manufacturers into a standards battle, with the war being fought out in on several booths at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Visitors are seeing UWB in use in laptops and HDTV's, while Freescale Semiconductor is showing off what it claims to be the world's first UWB-enabled mobile phone. An engineer from the company showed us a fairly large prototype mobile that could take images and transfer it directly to a laptop.

Nothing particularly clever about that, but Freescale claims UWB technology has the potential to usurp Wi-Fi in many devices, promising improved data rates and lower power consumption. According to the Freescale engineer, the technology can require 200 times less power than Wi-Fi and the mobile on display supported a throughput of 110Mbits/sec.

Demonstrations on an HDTV elsewhere on Freescale's booth provided a much faster experience.

Motorola is likely to be one of the first mobile makers to build UWB into a phone, although Freescale claims several other major manufacturers are also eyeing the technology. However, it will probably need to reduce the size of the chipsets first. The prototype required three distinct chips, making for a pretty hefty device, and Freescale is planning to shrink everything into one chip this year.

Other demonstrations on the Freescale booth included a ZigBee electronic home, wireless media streaming and home wireless storage.