Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE: TXN) has been flexing its muscle in the ultrawideband (UWB) community and is set to take a leading role in a new alliance that is expected to be announced this week -- which will push its preferred specification for a new Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc. (IEEE) standard for short-range, high-capacity (110 Mbits/s at 10 meters and up to 480 Mbits/s at 1 meter) wireless communications.

The new alliance will be called the Multi-Band OFDM Alliance and involves a merger of TI’s preferred orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) radio technology with ideas from the Intel-led UWB Multi-Band Coalition (see Coalition Cranks Up UWB). OFDM is a digital modulation technology that splits the signal into several narrow bands and attempts to minimize interference among the signals.

The move looks to have been timed for maximum impact, coming just days before the crucial IEEE 802.15.3a Task Group meeting that will take place in San Francisco between July 20 and 25. At that meeting, companies participating in the UWB standards process will have their first opportunity to vote on the differing proposals put before the group (see UWB Standards Shakedown).

According to Steve Turner of TI, much of the work needed to build the alliance occurred over the past couple of months. “We’re all coming together around an idea for OFDM multiband based on what we proposed in March. This is really starting to gain a lot of support,” he says pointing to the participation of consumer electronics heavyweights such as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. (Korea: SEC) and Panasonic in the alliance.

The alliance is especially significant because the OFDM camp and the multiband camp had previously been at loggerheads (see UWBers Get Busy in Texas). “There was a difference between OFDM and multiband,” confirms Mike Kelly, VP of semiconductor group marketing at Focus Enhancements Inc. “But the process has been evolving, and there are complementary aspects of these technologies that can be blended together nicely.

“We proposed a modified version of OFDM for wireless video, because it increases the range robustness better than any other technology and it makes the most efficient use of the power levels set by the FCC. There’s no question that OFDM will surpass the 110 Mbit/s over 10 meters performance requirement [set by the IEEE].”

— Gabriel Brown, Research Analyst, Unstrung