Undaunted, WHDI stakes its claim for wireless home

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Undaunted, WHDI stakes its claim for wireless home

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 10 December, 2009

READ MORE: Standards | Wi-Fi

It's almost impossible to keep up with the twists and turns in the wireless home network market, and particularly the fight to achieve a universal standard for high speed, short range connections geared to multimedia and HDTV. With the original frontrunner, UltraWideBand-based WiMedia, now consigned to Wireless USB, other UWB solutions have fallen out of favor, at least for now. This has left three main contenders - WiGig and WHDI, both based, at least loosely, on Wi-Fi; and WirelessHD, which uses technology from SiBeam and the 60GHz band. There is also the wild card of the recently ratified IEEE 802.15.3c standard, also for 60GHz and also using SiBeam designs, though focused on different applications to WirelessHD.

Last month, WHDI looked to be going the same way as WiMedia, as Sony defected to WirelessHD, but undeterred, the WHDI Consortium has completed its specifications and claims it still has a strong chance of gaining support among the consumer electronics and mobile communities.

When Sony dropped WHDI for new products in favor of WirelessHD, the main technology supplier in the platform, Amimon, decided to supplement its business by focusing on the sale of its IP to Wi-Fi companies. This seemed to be just another indicator that Wi-Fi was winning the home network war - and indeed, WHDI itself builds heavily on a 5GHz 802.11 base. Although 5GHz supports commoditized chips and devices, and longer ranges, it is somewhat out of fashion, with the WPAN world heavily focused for now on 60GHz. The emergence of chip technologies that enable low cost devices for this band has focused intense interest on, with WiGig as well as WirelessHD working here.

Despite swimming against the tide, the WHDI Consortium has completed its specs for wireless video over Amimon's Wi-Fi like technology. These promise to carry high definition video at 1080p resolution, 60Hz refresh rates and 12-bit color depth, over distances of up to 100 feet and through multiple walls, with peak data rates of 3Gbps in wide 40MHz channels. These specs go beyond the original Amimon platform, which was limited to 720p video, and WHDI now supports release 2.0 of the High Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) standard, as well as enhancing multiroom operation with support for the Consumer Electronics Control protocol, part of the HDMI platform. This shows WHDI coming closer to WirelessHD in functionality - the main focus for the rival standard, which has greater support among CE vendors so far, is wireless HDMI, while other technologies like 802.15.3c and even WiGig are likely to push down into mobile devices too.

The latest WHDI specs are available only to consortium members, which still include Sony, along with LG, Hitachi, Sharp, Motorola and Samsung. The group aims to have an interoperability test suite and certification lab in place by next fall. "We're not expecting first products using the technology until the third quarter or so," said a spokesperson, looking on the bright side of a year-long delay in releasing a set of specs that was originally expected at the end of 2008. The consortium was formed in July 2008, promising to build on some of the advances made to Wi-Fi in the 802.11n high speed standard, notably MIMO antenna arrays and 40MHz channels.

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