The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) is to work with developers of the rival Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology to make the two compatible, with products scheduled for as early as 2007. The move should accelerate progress of UWB, a technology for short-range links to support very high-speed data transfers.
UWB, aimed at applications such as streaming video, is expected to operate at up to 480Mbit/s compared with Bluetooth’s current 2.1Mbit/s. But a combined standard could capitalise on Bluetooth’s brand, qualification programme and application layer.
The plan is to add UWB as an optional physical layer for the Bluetooth communications stack. This would allow new equipment to be backwards compatible with current Bluetooth headsets, phones and PDAs, while new products could take full advantage of the faster data transfer speeds.
‘Members of the Bluetooth SIG would like to enable products with higher data rates,’ said Bluetooth SIG executive director Michael Foley. ‘It is the responsibility of the industry to recognise synergies and limit fragmentation as much as possible.’
Experts said the performance of the final standard might be slower than anticipated. Nick Hunn, managing director of Ezurio, a spin-out of TDK Systems, said, ‘[About] 50-100Mbit/s strikes me as where it’s aiming for. At these speeds you could have HDTV virtually uncompressed or PC backups.’
Cambridge Silicon Radio, the leading vendor of Bluetooth chips, said it will support UWB in future. A spokesman predicted the new Bluetooth spec would be finalised by mid-2006, and CSR expects to produce chips by 2007. Analysts said Bluetooth’s success in selling to 250 million consumers boosted the chances of UWB becoming popular.
The plans were welcomed by firms such as Intel and Motorola. Intel intends to use UWB as the basis for a wireless version of the USB standard. But UWB still faces challenges, chiefly the requirement for worldwide spectrum allocation.
www.uwbforum.org * www.bluetooth.org
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