Second wireless home standard in a week, as WiGig goes public
Published: 11 December, 2009
READ MORE: Spectrum | Standards | Testing/Certification | Wi-Fi
The world of home media networks is in turmoil, with two of the would-be standards publishing their specifications in a single week. First we saw the specs for WHDI, an approach based on Amimon's technology, which builds on 5GHz Wi-Fi to deliver uncompressed HD video around the home. Its efforts have been overshadowed recently by interest in the uncongested 60GHz band, which supports very high data rates, and one of the main standards efforts in this frequency, WiGig, has now published its own specs (the other main 60GHz contender is WirelessHD).
WiGig (the Wireless Gigabit Alliance) evolved from the 802.11 standards effort, and the IEEE's Very High Throughput taskgroup for Wi-Fi. Now the group has its first draft completed, and has signed up four new members, including an additional board member, Nvidia.
The specs enable data rates of 1Gbps to 7Gbps and the group, ambitiously, aims to support many protocol adaption layers (PALs) in order to provide a wireless platform for different personal area networking standards, notably HDMI, DisplayPort, PCI Express and USB. This multi-PAL approach was also used by WiMedia, which planned to support Bluetooth, IP and others, but has ended up confined only to Wireless USB (which WiGig is clearly eyeing now too). Running future versions of all these standards on the same wireless physical layer would create economies of scale for the chipmakers and their customers.
The WiGig Alliance was formed in May and now has over 20 members. Ratification is expected by April 2010, with products shipping in 2011 after the testing and certification process. Brian O'Rourke, a principal analyst for In-Stat, commented to EETimes:
"The WiGig effort is a complicated and bold move. Multiple PALs adds complexity to a system, which increases the chances of problems."
The WiGig spec is being written as an extension to the IEEE 802.11 standard but so far has no formal links to the Wi-Fi Alliance, or the 802.11ad group, which is in the early stages of setting a formal 60GHz standard. There is also the potential for conflict with another IEEE effort, 802.15.3c.
The spec defines the 60GHz PHY and a MAC optimized for that band, and describes techniques for beamforming, which extend range over 10 meters, and look similar to those used by the WirelessHD group, whose 60GHz solution leverages technology from SiBeam. Most of the optional WiGig features are defined in the PALs, two of which are close to completion - an audiovisual PAL for HDMI and DisplayPort protocols and HDCP 2.0 content protection. A separate PAL supports PCI Express and USB protocols and uses Wi-Fi's WPA security scheme.
The new members are AMD, Nvidia, SK Telecom and Chinese Wi-Fi certification lab TMC. Existing members include Atheros, Broadcom, Dell, Marvell, Mediatek, Microsoft, Panasonic, Samsung and Toshiba. The WiGig spec will be available on a royalty-free basis to members.
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