Motorola Inc. will bring a revised ultrawideband (UWB) proposal to a meeting of the IEEE 802.15.3a task group in Orlando, Fla., this week, along with what it says is proof that the new scheme offers a tenfold efficiency improvement — at very short ranges — over a competing technology vying for the nod as the IEEE UWB standard.

The altered proposal reflects Motorola's be-lief that the application sweet spot for UWB is no longer full-room networked video distribution over distances of up to 10 meters, but wireless links for handheld devices and peer-to-peer cable replacement applications within a range of about 3 meters.

Alereon Inc, an Austin, Texas based semiconductor company, introduced two ultrawideband (UWB) chips at CES 2004, designed to transmit at almost a half a gigabit per second at short distances.
Due by late 2004, Alereon's two chips are targeted at OEMs who will use them to build routers, access points, and UWB clients. Jeffrey Ross, Vice President at Alereon, claimed at least one customer has already signed up to use the chips, but refused to say who.

Texas Instruments Inc. announced plans Monday (Dec. 8) to offer royalty-free licenses for any patents it holds within the Multiband-OFDM Alliance's (MBOA) ultrawideband proposal — should the proposal be ratified by the IEEE 802.15.3a task group working on a high-speed, short-range wireless physical layer.

The Cellonics™ Technology is a powerful modulation and demodulation technique exploiting Non-linear Dynamical Systems (NDS) behaviour. It was motivated by research studies on the electrical waveforms that biological cells generate when stimulated. The mathematical formulations to simulate such cell responses require NDS theory that is used to study complex non-linear systems (or phenomena) like the weather, population growth and Chaos. The fact that the technique is non-linear enables performance exceeding conventional means and perhaps counter intuitively, the implementation is extremely simple.

Wireless communication's hottest new development is still a year away from putting a commercial product on the market, but it has already been adapted for a wired application to double cable TV capacity.

This development for ultrawideband radio-or UWB-as well as its reputed ability to transmit through walls and move tons of data in microseconds could make it the most versatile new technology to come along since the personal computer.