Interconnects

Why the consortia virus is spreading

2008-07-24T17:01:00.000-07:00

I've got a simple theory for why we are seeing so many, sometimes overlapping wireless consortiums with sometimes overlapping memberships.

This week Amimon announced a group of top consumer companies backing its 5GHz technology for sending uncompressed video across the digital home. It competes directly with the WirelessHD group SiBeam helped launch around 60 GHz technology for in-room links. Last week Sony debuted a group backing its TransferJet for short range synchs.

I am speculating the startups in search of credibility and design wins that can help them bootstrap into the mainstream offer a deal that's hard to refuse: Contribute some time from a few engineers and you get a chance to look at and influence the technology to make sure it works well on your systems, and maybe even a lower cost for adoption if you decide to use it.

There's very little to lose on such a deal, especially for the giant consumer electronics companies who have been jumping into multiple groups. The lesson: When the consortia virus strikes, immunize yourself with a dose of reality. These groups sound important, but they may not be good predictors of who will use what in a consumer wireless market that is still a wide open field where many flowers will blossom.

Bogatin Begins Blog

2008-07-18T14:33:00.000-07:00

Just a quick shout out to consultant Eric Bogatin who runs the "Be the Signal" Web site and has recently started blogging on the topic of technical tips for signal integrity engineers. Eric is one of my go-to guys when the questions get too sticky for my limited on-the-job engineering training to handle, so I am sure practitioners and all those folks over at the SI-List will find this blog useful.

TransferJet takes wing

2008-07-17T09:57:00.000-07:00

Talk about being blindsided. I thought Sony's announcement at CES about its ultrawideband-based TransferJet technology was an anomaly, something that would die a quiet death. Surprise, a slew of consumer companies are saying this morning they will participate in an effort to standardize the technology.

Well at a claimed 560 mMbits/s (PHY rate?) and an easy touch-to-associate user model, they have a good start. And now with giants such as Panasonic, Samsung, Toshiba and a handful of camera companies behind them, they have some clout.

As PR guru Susan Cain who forwarded the TransferJet release to me said, "Just what we need another wireless consortium!" Yeah, we have wireless USB, WirelessHD (60 GHz), WiFi Alliance, WiMedia, more out there now and more yet to come I know for a fact. Gotta find out more…

ABI makes UWB picks

2008-07-16T16:59:00.000-07:00

Market watcher ABI Research reported today that WiQuest, Alereon and Pulse~Link came out tops among ultrawideband suppliers when measured on a range of factors. All three offer physical layer, RF transceiver and media access controller silicon and the three are tops in numbers of announced design wins.

WiQuest leads the pack largely because it claims it has won sockets at Belkin, Dell, DLink, Lenovo and Toshiba, said ABI analyst Doug McEuen.

McEuen admits the outlook for UWB is not as rosy as when many of the startups were cropping up a few years back, in part because the goal of 480 Mbit/second devices is still elusive. "But its still quite a viable market," he added.

The salmon of the CEA

2008-07-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

The folks over at the Consumer Electronics Association are full of Omega-3s these days. They want to define a universal interconnect for media players by running copy protected High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) signals over the CEA's existing Portable Digital Media Interface (PDMI, aka CEA-2017).

That's a great and ambitious idea that would really serve consumer interests. Just imagine being able to take any media player and link it to any car or home docking station or other peripheral. Fabulous.

But, um, you know there's this company called Apple that makes this thing called an iPod. They have this tendency to sort of do their own thing. And sense the typical teenage consumer does not know the brand name for a second media player device, they can pretty much get away with these shenanigans, forcing the industry to follow their ad hoc-ish lead.

By the way, for those other companies--unknown to teenagers--also making media players there's this plug called USB. It's pretty popular. Maybe not quite the thing for a car in its current state, but these USB folks are pretty active in rolling out variantions and upgrades.

So my dear friends over at the CEA, I look forward to watching your ambitious efforts to swim upstream in digital media. If anyone has any observations or insights on this effort, post a comment or drop a note at rmerritt@techinsights.com.

Lou's views on links to use

2008-07-01T10:09:00.001-07:00

I had a chance to catch up recently with Lou Lenzi (pictured), a veteran consumer electronics designer who currently heads up product management for the accessories business at Audiovox. He talked about several interconnects he is using in his latest consumer products including HD-PLC, WiFi and CEA-909.

Audiovox is rolling out a $399 wireless HDMI connector for flat-screen TVs and projectors using HD-PLC, the powerline technology developed by Panasonic. Lenzi's team surveyed many options including competing powerline approaches, ultrawideband technology from Pulse~Link and Tzero and Amimon's WiFi derivative.

Powerline was the best bet for adding no new wires around the wall-mounted displays and projectors, Lenzi's team concluded. HD-PLC gave his systems a net 90 Mbits/s, less than the advertised 190 Mbits/s but plenty enough to support a 1080-progressive display.

"We looked at them all, and were very impressed by their 128-bit AES encryption which will play well with content owners," said Lenzi. "Their technology spans multiple circuit breakers, and they have an easy pairing method," he added.

The only downside for powerline in general is cost. "I'd like to see the modules get down to $49 to really take off. Right now they are at $99," he said.

Lenzi's group also makes a variety of universal remotes for which WiFi is becoming increasingly important. Startups ZeroG and G2 are doing a good job pushing down component prices to get WiFi into more systems such as remotes, he said.

Finally, Lenzi's big new product for the fall is an indoor flat antenna for over-the-air digital TV that can plug into any analog or HDTV. He estimates some 20 million U.S. homes use over-the-air as their primary TV source. Another 14 million use it for at least one TV in the home.

"That’s a big opportunity for us," with the cut-off of analog signals coming in February 2009, he said.

The antenna can deliver a crisper picture than satellite TV systems which typically compress signals down to a tight 7 Mbits/s. So, even some HDTV users may buy the antenna box to get the best reception for special events such as the Super Bowl.

"If you do a side-by-side comparison of high def from over-the-air versus cable or satellite you would be surprised at the difference," said Lenzi.

Audiovox has patented the layout for antenna plates it uses in its mini-pizza box unit. Lenzi said the new CEA-909 interface that lets users "steer" antennas by electrically exciting different combinations of the plates will be a key feature for an upcoming crop of DTV converter boxes. The interface will eventually appear on set-top boxes and DTVs, too.

I first met Lou perhaps more than a decade ago when he was designing PC-TV systems for Thomson. Times and technologies have changed quite a bit since then, but Lou remains an optimistic and innovative engineer at heart.

Thanks for hitting me!

2008-06-30T08:11:00.000-07:00

Somewhere along the line last week this little blog crossed 100,000 hits to date. I know that ain't much in these days of Web 2.0 mass market mania where everybody is angling for millions per week or day, but to this old-school print trade journalist who is still learning how to be a Webbie, it is amazing to think something done in my spare (!!) time has been viewed 100,000 times.

This milestone is especially gratifying given the fact I haven't been able to post daily for some time because I have been extra busy with other work stuff—and life stuff. So thanks, keep coming back and don't hesitate to provide feedback in a comment here or an email to rmerritt@techinsights.com

Is WiMax wobbly?

2008-06-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

A new Frost & Sullivan report suggesting WiMax is in trouble is getting some attention today, latching on to a broader debate my colleague Jack Shandle explored with his recent story on the outlook for harmonizing WiMax and LTE.

There’s been a fair bit of tit-for-tat between WiMax and LTE lately. A group of LTE assembled to drive interoperability testing today. Recently both LTE and WiMax backers created separate efforts to come to grips with patent issues.

One of the big proponents of WiMax has been Intel which has dangled the possibility of rolling a combo WiFi/WiMax chip set into future Centrino notebooks to kick start this market as it did 802.11. It will be well worth watching for any developments on this front at the big Intel event in August. Meanwhile, the debates rage on.

Making sense of sensor nets

2008-06-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

A brief trip to IEEE Secon raised more questions than answers for me about the status and outlook for wireless sensor networks.

A workshop on WiFi meshes suggested a few small companies are seeing some market traction with the technology despite the fact the 802.11s standard has gotten bogged down and there appears to be a lot of fundamental research still being worked out. Eric Brewer made it clear the technology has both huge potential and tremendous challenges in what is its potentially biggest market—getting the developing world on the Net.

A fire hose of a keynote from David Culler (pictured) raised other questions about work in the lower power, lower bandwidth 802.15.4 world. Here too it seems there are still unresolved standards and software issues for the industry, particularly around how meshes and routing are being defined. Culler’s efforts hold promise of a way forward, despite questions about what are the driving apps for sensor nets.

I suspect the apps are diverse ranging from the factory floor to health care at home, as Intel has shown. BTW, whatever happened to that national sensor net programs folks around the U.S. Homeland Security Department were talking about a few years ago?

Super story for GbE

2008-06-19T10:24:00.000-07:00

Vendors cranked the volume on Infiniband at the International Supercomputing conference in Dresden this week with news on products from QLogic, Voltaire and a new roadmap for the IBTA. Likewise IB proponents were quick to jump on the bandwagon--along with AMD--for their part in the success of IBM’s Roadrunner cracking the petaflops barrier.

But an editor of the Top 500 list was quick to point out Gbit Ethernet still dominates the world’s biggest systems, appearing in 285 of the supers compared to just 120 for IB. The IB installations tended to be high-end academic machines while GbE was more often used in commercial systems, he added.

And as for AMD, despite its high profile appearance in Roadrunner, its presence has diminished in the latest Top 500, a casualty of its missteps and Intel’s success with quad-core chips.

On sensor nets and more

2008-06-12T10:28:00.000-07:00

I am headed to IEEE Secon next week, a technical ground zero for work on wireless sensor networks. I see participation in the event from a wide range of universities as well as top tier tech companies including Alca-Lu, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and Nokia.

From anyone engaged in the event or the sector, I’d love to hear what are you consider the key technology and market struggles as I get myself oriented to cover this event. Drop a comment here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com.

At an Intel Research event yesterday I heard a lot about wireless sensor nets for use in elder care, an emerging market Intel is trying to enable with its Shimmer sensors that currently use 802.15.4 and Bluetooth.

I also found out Intel is about to hand off to OEMs technology to create WiFi backhaul systems that can deliver 6 Mbits/s over 30 kilometers without using fancy high gain antennas or pushing the limits on regulatory power regimes. If they use better antennas and push power limits, they can send 4 Mbits across 100 km, said David Taylor (above right) who helped refine the software. The Intel technology involves software for a modified WiFi MAC protocol that uses slotted TDMA, enabling products that could be of use bringing the Web to the developing world.

Taylor was quick to point out the so-called Rural Connectivity Platform is a point-to-point link only and won’t compete with WiMax, Intel’s current wireless hobby horse. My view: between what WiFi and LTE will do, Intel would be better served to ease up on its whole WiMax religion—but that’s fodder for another story.

Here comes IOV

2008-06-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

I look forward to popping into the annual PCI SIG meeting in San Jose tomorrow and am already hearing significant news about the release of the IOV specs. It ain’t the full PCI Express for the embedded world that ASI hoped to be, but there is nevertheless real momentum to use the standard to further drive PCI Express into comms and embedded gear, so look out RapidIO.

If there are any other importat wrinkles in the Express world I need to know about—issues with Express 3.0 or whatever—now’s the time to chime in as I get ready to dive into this pool.

On difficult partnerships

2008-06-03T22:06:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Patrick Mannion of TechOnline for tipping me off this morning to the conflict over 60 GHz. I had no idea the 802.15.3c folks and the 802.11 VHT crowd were about to have a big powwow to figure out how to parse out separate standards in this spectrum peacefully.

Craig Mathias says there is plenty of room for multiple standards and product approaches in this promising area, so bring on the competition. I’d like to hear other opinions about multi-Gbit wireless nets so please chime in here or at rmerritt@techinsights.com.

What role do you think WiFi could play at 60 GHz, especially given the market lead SiBeam has with its .3c-like approach? Is there a real opportunity for the VHTL6 concept of an aggregate Gbit WiFi net at less than 6 MHz? And what does all this hubbub mean for Wireless USB and other ultrawideband wannabees?

And while you’re at it, what do you think of an Obama-Clinton ticket in 2008?

Will LSI buy Chelsio?

2008-06-02T15:37:00.000-07:00

It’s a reasonable speculation from where I sit in the blogosphere. In a recent interview with CEO Ahbi Talwalkar (left) I found out the company lacks standard Ethernet chips to support its nascent drive into networking, but it does has an investment in the startup that was early to the long-coming 10G party.

It’s clear a good 10G capability would be key for the company that wants to live sat the space where storage and networking meet. However, there are plenty of available startups out there, LSI has some custom capabilities that could spawn products and there is always the question of when the timing is right for the 10G ramp to really start.

I’m thinking pretty darn soon. But I’d love to hear any good insights you may have in a comment or at rbmerrit@cmp.com

PAN-ing for gold

2008-06-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

Startup Ozmo debuts today with a novel idea for scaling back Wi-Fi chips for personal-area net connections in mice, keyboards, headsets and more. Intel will enable these and other kinds of WiFi PANs under its Cliffside project as I noted below.

I talked with Todd Antes, vice president of marketing for Atheros recently about a low cost- .11n router design from the company. He said Atheros demonstrated a Cliffside like capability at CES last January, though he would not comment on whether the company has any chip in the works similar to those from Ozmo.

“Philosophically we believe in [WiFi PANs],” he said. “Notebooks are getting smaller, so it makes a lot of sense to let one radio accomplish more tasks,” he added.

WiFi uber alles

2008-05-28T17:18:00.000-07:00

I am playing catch up with Cliffside, an Intel project to put WiFi in the personal area network disclosed at IDF Shanghai. Turns out this work and another effort (stay tuned for a Monday story) has a lot of people excited about WiFi someday becoming the one radio you need to handle everything from mice to linking to the Net.

One of my fave wireless analysts, Craig Mathias, claims the time has come for WiFi PANs. "In a couple years a WiFi PAN business could be very successful," Mathias told me on the phone today. It won't kill Bluetooth--nothing dies in high tech--but it could stunt its long term growth worse than a bad cigarette habit.

Intel claims its technology can connect up to eight WiFi devices to a notebook on a PAN while the computer is on a WiFi LAN. The technology could improve the quality of media streamed between a computer and a TV or other display because it eliminates the latency of going through an access point.

The Cliffside program uses a modified Intel WiFi chip with additional buffers to rapidly switch between PAN and LAN modes and is expected to ship within 12 months, said Gary Martz, a marketing manager for the program. He said use will probably be limited to consumer notebooks for the first year or so.

"Corporate IT managers will probably have a heart attack, perceiving this as enabling notebooks to be a bunch of rouge access points that impact performance of their WiFi networks," Martz said.

Mathias was animated in his enthusiasm for WiFi. "WiFi's success is unquestionable. It will be in everything. Twenty years from now people will still be talking about WiFi."

Good, we tech reporters need the job security ;-)

Ethernet's puppy

2008-05-26T22:32:00.000-07:00

I haven't had my eye on the ball of the high-speed Ethernet standards effort over at the IEEE 802.3ba for awhile, so I talked to the chair of the committee, John D'Ambrosia late last week for an update. This is big complex stuff about the future of Ethernet, the data center and converged telecoms at mind-bending 40 and 100G speeds.

John reports all goes well with technical progress at the last meeting, as many as 200 expected at the next meeting and appropriate debates on the floor. I haven't heard much from the committee at large about this effort, so if you have some observations or opinions on this big leap forward post a comment or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com.

While this standard is gestating, John has a new puppy at home (pictured while snoozing) that is also growing fast. John says it's possible the .3ba work could be in an early draft stage by March and a late draft in November. By that time little Buster D'Ambrosia will be chomping down dog food at a 40 or maybe 100G rate.

Quick predictions on graphics

2008-05-26T22:07:00.000-07:00

I spent a couple days researching GDDR5 for an EE Times story last week. From what I learned, here are a few quick and free from-the-hip predictions. Take them for what they are worth.

--AMD will be the first to use GDDR5 on a new graphics controller to be announced soon.
--Archrival Nvidia will wait as long as possible before moving to GDDR5, opting to use the more economical GDDR3 at 1.3 GHz+ as long as possible
--Intel will use GDDR5 on its much-anticipated Larrabee controller when it debuts probably in late 2009, but the part won’t make that big of a splash in the market in its first generation.
--Rambus will struggle to get traction with XDR in HDTVs and elsewhere, crossing its fingers for better luck in next-generation videogame consoles with a second or third generation technology.

Think I'm wrong? Share a prediction of your own here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com. What to learn more? Check out this white paper.

China rising

2008-05-14T22:57:00.000-07:00

You get interesting glimpses into where a company is at trolling the job boards. I saw a recent ad for Hua Wei on the SI-List for an engineer that indictaed where this company is on its climb from a copier of Cisco products to an innovator of modest capabilities in its own right.

The ad called for an SI designer who ideally has "experience in taping out multi-million gate CMOS ASICs in 130nm technology and below." They are willing to take someone with no more than a bachelor's degree and two-years industry experience to handle "evaluation and choice of 3rd party IO buffer and SerDes IP for ASIC design."

Clearly, they are not at the exalted level of Cisco's 90nm Quantum Flow Processor or even its FCoE work, but few ASIC designers on the globe could pull off a design like that. Nevertheless, the China's answer to Cisco is clearly on the rise, and I'd like to—and expect to--hear more from them.

8G Fibre Channel heats up

2008-05-13T10:34:00.000-07:00

In the relatively slow and steady pace of the Fibre Channel world, competition is starting to heat up around the transition to 8 Gbit/s products. Storage switching giant Brocade rolled out its portfolio of 8G switches and server cards today.

Emulex was quick to point out it has been there, done that with server cards already qualified by EMC. Indeed both Emulex and QLogic were early to the 8G party with cards they rolled last summer.

Despite a little bit of temperatures rising, I recall what Renato Recio of IBM told me during an interview for a recent story about Fibre Channel over Ethernet. For users that what high performance and need to move this year FC is the safe bet, but for 2009 the FCoE community should have its ducks al in a row to be a solid competitor.

Ethernet gets green

2008-05-08T23:17:00.000-07:00

There's plenty of work to do at the IEEE 802.3az, but Intel's proposal for a low power idle version of Ethernet has already got the nod to be part of the group's spec for 100 Mbit and Gbit chips. The next big debate will be whether it or a Broadcom proposal for a so-called subset PHY wins out for 10 Gbit chips and for backplane Ethernet.

Next week's meeting is the final call for proposals, so if you have a hot idea for green Ethernet better find the meeting and come with Powerpoint in hand or forever hold your peace. I'd be happy to host a debate on the trade off between these two approaches if anyone wants to take one side or the other in comment posting here.

The Conexant/CopperGate connection

2008-05-07T17:59:00.000-07:00

No big surprise that Conexant sold off its powerline networking group today. Linking the dots on its future, it's not a big shocker HomePNA specialist CopperGate Communications was the buyer.

The Multimedia over Coax spec is Conexant's current direction in home nets these days. A Conexant exec told me at the MoCA conference last fall that Conexant plans to ship discrete MoCA RF and baseband chips in the second half of 2008, then follow them up with chips that integrate MoCA support as a block on its silicon for DSL, MPEG and passive optical network chips for set-tops, routers and optical network terminals.

Conexant and Broadcom both joined the MoCA board recently, telegraphing plans for MoCA silicon. Conexant had already given up on earlier plans to make HomePlug AV chips, believing the technology will have difficulty keeping pace with the bandwidth needs of digital media.

For its part, CopperGate is very bullish on the ITU's G.hn standard as part of its road to the future. CopperGate just announced it has delivered five million chips for HomePNA over phone and coax lines to date. It bought Connexant's powerline group so it could add to its mix that technology which European carriers demand.

Looking to the future, CopperGate foresees the day when a completed G.hn could allow it to deliver a chip that handles all three wired media in a standard way. The company also plans to offer chips that support G.hn as well as the version 4.0 of HomePNA now in progress. One chip, all home net markets--that's the Holy Grail.

I wonder why Conexant didn't see that broader win, hang on to its power line group and prepare for the same single-chip future.

RapidIO fans out

2008-05-05T17:07:00.000-07:00

Tom Cox pointed out to me that I missed a milestone back in February when RMI Corp. (formerly Raza Microelectronics) announced a processor for wireless base stations using a native serial RapidIO interface. It was the first MIPS chip with the interface that has previously been used in PowerPCs and DSPs.

No big surprise that anything linking into the wireless base station might go RIO, given the traction the group has gotten in DSP farms there with Ericsson, TI and others. But will the MIPS win expand beyond RMI?

Cox, executive director of the RIO trade group, suggests the right dynamics are in place. Cost reduction, the need for better communications links and the rise of multicore processors will drive out FPGA-based bridges in use today between MIPS chips and RIO farms, he said.

The RIO group has gotten several new members recently including Nortel and Qualcomm. No word on exactly what these folks are up to yet. If you have some insights, post a comment or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com

Waiting on Home Net 2010

2008-05-01T12:03:00.000-07:00

Jockeying for position in the home network circa 2010 will be a major consumer sport with the HomeGrid Forum jumping into the fray. The players all will want to position themselves as the best solution for everyone from carriers to OEMs to consumers.

So far MoCA, HomePlug and HomePNA have been pretty quiet about their plans to leap toward the 400+ Mbits/s carriers are calling for in the next year or so. But everyone has heard that call including the HomeGrid folks who want to goose the G.hn effort to deliver that over coax as well as a reach goal of Gbit links when possible.

Writing an analysis of the latest news revealed a few interesting wrinkles. For example, the wired (MoCA, Powerline and HomePNA crew) represent just 19 percent of today's home nets which are dominated by WiFi and wired Ethernet. And most of HomePNA's installs are on coax, not phone lines.

To get one overarching standard will require a tussle between the big vendors who want a unified market and the small vendors with silicon skin in the game. Already Pulse~Link is suggesting G.hn should re-think its choice of OFDM (which it does not use), while HomePlug folk praise the group for the choice (because they made it, too).

Meanwhile the powerline folks at IEEE 1901 have yet to be able to muster support for a confirming vote on a HomePlug/Panasonic home net proposal. The vote was put off at meetings in October, December and March, but may come up in July. Not a good sign for consensus building in this community.

Holy Grail for home nets

2008-04-29T15:03:00.000-07:00

Could we be headed for one spec that delivers the best home networking over coax, phone or power lines? That's what they hope over at the HomeGrid Forum that launched yesterday with 11 members companies. They aim to accelerate work on the ITU-T G.hn standard-in-progress.

Turns out only a couple percent of the estimated 140 million home nets today use MoCA or HPNA and maybe 10 percent use some form of powerline, according to market gazers over at Parks Associates. It's mainly Wi-Fi and wired Ethernet at home today.

Still, it could be quite a boost for the industry to get behind one interoperable standard. I'm gathering opinions on this effort for a print wrap up story, so if you have something insightful to offer, drop a comment here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com. Can this work? Will people get behind it? What will it take? Sound off!

40G consensus at hand

2008-04-29T15:01:00.000-07:00

That's what Nick Ilyadis, CTO of Broadcom's Ethernet networking group claims in a story I posted today.

It was noisy on his end at Interop and he may have been pumped up about all the 65nm products he was rolling in Vegas, but he seemed to feel with Broadcom's recent move to back a so-called Multi-Link Distribution proposal, the IEEE 802.3ba work on 40G Ethernet might reach consensus on a proposal at their next meeting.

If you have some insights into the issue at hand, post a comment here or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com. I want to stay on top of this work and need a little of your citizen journalism reporting to help me out!

Still more on 10G

2008-04-22T11:40:00.000-07:00

More 10G news flowed this week in the after glow of the Storage Networking World conference where FCoE had a big coming out party.

I was interested to see 10GBase-KR get a boost with Fujitsu's new 10GE switch chip, but analysts were quick to point out there are plenty of signal integrity problems ahead getting today's 3 Gbit backplanes to 10G.

Good also to see Aquantia joining SolarFlare with a 5.5W 10GBase-T transceiver. It will be interesting to see how long Broadcom and Marvell stand on the sidelines waiting for a market to develop here.

On the server side, Mellanox is promising new firmware so it can carry a wealth of protocols on top of its ConnectX cards that handle all sort of net and storage functions on Infiniband and 10GE. It marked the first time I had heard Mellanox use the increasingly widespread term from Cisco—Data Center Ethernet—referring to the lossless version of the net still going through the standards process.

Cisco cool on 10GBase-T

2008-04-13T21:54:00.000-07:00

I got an interesting reality check on 10GBase-T from Ethernet giant Cisco Systems last week. The company's hot new data center spin-in, Nuova Systems said it will not use the standard for 10G over 100 meter copper in its latest switches.

"10GBase-T is great in terms of compatibility and simplicity, but the additional power, cost and latency means it is not really feasible for us and I don't think we will use it," said Dante Malagrino, director of product marketing at Nuova for a story that should be posted to EE Times shortly.

Instead Nuova/Cisco will use a hybrid solution based on a new copper cable terminated by SFP+ optical transceivers which it claims has lower power and latency than the 10GBase-T options. Malagrino pegged 10GBase-T at 2-3 microseconds in latency and 4-8W per link in power consumption. The new hybrid option, one of several alternative cables to emerge in the last year, will initially be limited to 1, 3 and 5 meter lengths but could shave 30 percent off the overall costs of an optical fibre link, he said.

SolarFlare Communications, one of three startups working on 10GBase-T transceivers, is announcing a single 65nm CMOS chip that transmits 10G over copper up to 100 meters while consuming 5.5W. But the chip is just back from the fab and has not yet passed testing.

Competitors Aquantia and Teranetics may follow suit with similar products before the end of the year. I've yet to hear anything from established players such as Broadcom and Marvell. (If you know something, drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com)

SolarFlare claims 10GBase-T switches, aggregation boxes and server cards are in the works, some of which will ship before the end of the year. But the Cisco comment makes me think the new crop of transceivers while major accomplishments in design still may not extend very far the reach of this emerging market.

Moving at 10G rates

2008-04-10T07:55:00.000-07:00

I've been amazed to see how rapidly the broad group of companies backing Fibre Channel over Ethernet has been moving, given how much there is to do to create this converged data center network. But after some further digging yesterday I see progress is not quite as fast as their marketing departments would have us believe.

The first FCoE products released this week are still pre-standard and many are less than elegant. The reality is the real product wave will hit sometime early next year, as I reported last night.

Still, the FCoE group has been gaining momentum in monthly meetings. A separate CEE Authors group is trying to crank up the pace on the (notoriously slow) IEEE standards efforts.

I give special kudos to Cisco for driving in the diamond lane on this initiative. Their Nexus 5000 shows not only fast time-to-market with an ASIC-laden design but an innovative business approach with its spin-in of start-up Nuova Systems. This tactic, first tried with Andiamo, helped Cisco attract outside data center expertise it needed with people such as Ed Bugnion, the former CTO of VMware who is now Nuova's chief technology officer.

A tip of the hat from the Interconnects blog for the nice work by the folks in Little Italy up on San Jose's Tasman drive.

FCoE party begins

2008-04-08T17:28:00.000-07:00

My hat is off to the many people driving Fibre Channel over Ethernet. The breadth of support at the Storage Networking World event today was mind blowing considering the technology only hit the radar screen a few months ago. Several big companies are being fast and nimble on this one—particularly Cisco Systems which seems to be reprising its success with the Andiamo spin-in Nuova Systems.

But there's plenty here I do not yet understand. How will these folk roll with the punches when IEEE advanced Ethernet and T11 FCoE standards finally close? Can it all be handled in software?

Is it true as competitors say that Emulex and QLogic are doubling up with Ethernet, Fibre Channel (and glue logic) silicon all crowded on to their adapter cards? Sounds expensive.

Meanwhile, my 10GBase-T questions from last week remain unanswered. I understand two companies may be ready to talk about new and better transceivers, but I have heard precious little from giants Broadcom, Intel and Marvell on this issue.

Will there be a hangover after the party in Orlando?

FCoE and 10GBase-T ASAP

2008-04-03T16:40:00.000-07:00

Holy acronymity, Batman! No wonder this interconnect world drives me whacky sometimes. What's really scary is I actually know what this stuff means...and I want to learn more!

I have briefings coming up Monday on the latest and greatest in Fibre Channel over Ethernet and 10 Gbit/s Ethernet over copper. If you have any perspective, hot tips, leaks or heads ups about what you or others are doing in these spaces, please drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com or post a comment here ASAP.

So if you have anything to say on these technologies, sling it now or plan to hold your peace for awhile.

BTW, sorry I have neglected this little plot of the blogosphere lately. I was on a two-week trip in Asia that ended with a quick tour to the MultiCore Expo and Ocean Tomo Spring auction. There's a lot on my plate these days—-check out the Intellectual Property Symposium--so I appreciate your bearing with me as I get to this little side interest of mine whenever I can.

Infiniband eyes million-unit market

2008-03-31T09:18:00.000-07:00

The pace of growth for Infiniband is on the rise, but so far the interconnect is not gaining much traction in mainstream business applications. That's the conclusion from an updated report from market watchers at International Data Corp.

IDC now expects Infiniband sales on end devices will rise from about 500,000 adapters this year to more than a million in 2011 with revenues jumping from about $125 million to about $275 million. Sales of switch ports will increase from about 600,000 this year to more than one million by 2010 with revenues on that side rising from about $250 million to about $400 million. High performance computers (HPC), database systems running on clusters and financial systems "with HPC-like characteristics" continue to be the drivers, according to IDC.

Mellanox, the sole maker of Infiniband chips, notes that the shift to 20 Gbit/s links is moving quickly with 40 Gbit/s products on the near horizon for this year. "In our last quarter, 79 percent of Mellanox's business was for [20 Gbit/s] DDR products," said Thad Omura, vice president of product marketing at Mellanox.

The chip company naturally wants to drive Infiniband into more mainstream data centers. Omura pointed to three users employing the interconnect as a cost-saving way to consolidate multiple Gbit Ethernet links on to one IB cable, a kind of unified networking approach Sun said it will drive starting later this year probably with the rollout of 40 Gbit products.

Support for Infiniband on VMware 3.5 and for NFS over RDMA in Linux could help grease the way for more such deployments. But for the foreseeable future most users will choose Ethernet if they are cost sensitive rather than a technology upgrade to Infiniband.

Encountering Hong Kong's Octopus

2008-03-25T18:22:00.000-07:00

I admit I was skeptical about near field communications. I ignored comments from Intel wireless USB exec Jeff Ravencraft who said contactless cards enable a wonderfully intuitive usage model. Colleagues at EE Times said NFC had an uphill battle. And I thumbed my nose at a fledgling trial in the Bay Area.

But my experience seeing in action the Octopus card in Hong Kong has modified my views. Run by the company of the same name, the service uses Sony's FeliCa NFC technology and is widely popular here. It even comes embedded in watches, stuffed toys and key chains as well as the popular cards that can all be purchased at the local subway station (see picture, right).

It may never take off in America, but I understand it is doing well in Japan, great in Hong Kong where I am presently visiting and likely to spread elsewhere based on this beachhead.

UWB questions Bluetooth on Wi-Fi

2008-03-20T03:54:00.000-07:00

Call it the jealous wife syndrome. The Ultrawideband community has been rumbling since the Bluetooth SIG announced it would create a version of its spec that works over both 802.11abg and UWB. Jack Shandle, editor of the Wireless Net Designline got the folks at Staccato to give the first technical analysis of their concerns.

Jack makes it clear part of the issue may be the competitive politics of the emerging UWB crowd fighting to retain as much as possible of what was going to be an exclusive application. The technical part of the issue, according to the Staccato paper, is that Bluetooth over Wi-Fi may create interference with IMT-2000 and WiMax traffic at distances up to 16 meters. The paper says the industry should conduct more tests and consider defining mitigation schemes or recommending use only of the 5GHz 802.11a spec.

Jack is seeking broader industry comment on the issue, and I'd like to hear what you have to say about it, too.

BTW, I am in the middle of a ten-day Asia trip, thus fewer posts than usual. But ping me if I am missing something big and I'll try to make time to post.

My old Missouri home

2008-03-13T14:27:00.000-07:00

Sam Lucero, a senior analyst for ABI Research released a study this week predicting home automation is finally poised to take off. Zigbee and Z-Wave products are gaining traction as de facto standards and lower cost approaches than yesterday's custom installations and retailers like Best Buy are getting on board with offerings from the likes of 4HomeMedia, iControl Networks, Portus, uControl and Xanboo, he states.

I haven't seen Lucero's report but I am remaining a show-me skeptic. I agree with Lucero who foresees service providers rolling out home automation and security systems as a value-added service. But I don't believe it will happen for a looong time. This year enabling the multi-room DVR is the big focus for many service providers, so automated lights and web cams from Comcast and Verizon are still a way off in my view.

Got some hard evidence to the contrary? Let me know with a posting here or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com

The return of HomePlug

2008-03-10T08:58:00.000-07:00

The HomePlug crew will deliver a fleshed out proposal for a powerline standard by June, in time for a possible first vote on at a July meeting of the IEEE 1901 group. That was the promise from Oleg Logvinov, chief strategy officer of the HomePlug consortium in a recent chat.

HomePlug is responding to charges from competitor DS2 which said the 1901 effort has stalled and the HomePlug group has yet to articulate details of its proposal. HomePlug claimed victory in the standards battle back in October when its proposal was down-selected, but has been slow to deliver a detailed plan. Yet to come is any report from the 1901 group chairman, but that may appear this week on the group's Web site.

HDMI in the notebook

2008-03-07T15:14:00.000-08:00

Keith Cowal, a PC marketing manager at Dolby Labs told me today he sees a rising tide of HDMI links going into notebooks. The reasons are two-fold.

Notebooks are incorporating Blu-Ray drives and its AACS technology requires content protected interfaces such as HDM. And OEMs see users plugging notebooks into their TVs and stereos (which already have HDMI) to play Internet and packaged movies and music on the big screens and speakers. Makes sense to me.

I had thought DisplayPort won the war, but Keith says DP will mainly appear in desktops as a link to monitors. I know it will also be used as an LVDS replacement in notebooks, but that doesn't solve the mega problem of how do I play Web video on my HDMI-equipped TVs. Looks like Silicon Image may have a bigger potential revenue stream than I had expected.

A few glitches ahead: To support Dolby's TrueHD audio, you need HDMI 1.3, which is only supported in the latest chip sets. Drivers don't often do a good enough job of identifying HDMI audio interconnects to Windows, and there are still a wide variety of content protection technologies implemented on the PC including Windows' Protected Media Path. But this should all shake out in the next year, Keith says.

Interlaken makes splash in Cisco QFP

2008-03-04T10:55:00.000-08:00

One of the key points Cisco Systems makes about its 20 Gbit/s Quantum Flow Processor, officially launched today as secret sauce in the company's new edge router, is that it has plenty of headroom because it is designed for a 40 Gbit/s upgrade. Turns out the Interlaken interconnect Cisco defined with Cortina Systems is the key ingredient in that upgrade.

Cisco will spin a version of the QFP that replaces four SPI 4.2 ports with four Interlaken ports to get the 40 Gbit/s throughput. The QFP internal architecture is already plumbed for 40G, the company claims.

Perhaps this high profile role will help the Interlaken technology see broader industry use beyond the walls of Cisco. Tundra and Altera already support Interlaken, a transport independent protocol that some already run at up to 60 Gbit/s. Perhaps it's time for members of the Optical Internetworking Forum to consider making some version of Interlaken an approved standard along with its own SPI-S.

More sparks on powerline

2008-03-01T16:14:00.000-08:00

Just got an email from Chano Gomez, vice president of technology and strategic partnerships at DS2, who says the IEEE 1901 powerline standard is gridlocked. You will recall from earlier reports, DS2 strongly opposes proposals from the HomePlug consortium to create standard that can use either groups' physical layer technology.

Chano says the standards effort is still in the early days of a process that could take another two years. He notes the HomePlug proposal only allows separate technologies to co-exist not truly interoperate. And he says the HomePlug folk have yet to define the Inter-PHY Protocol at the heart of their proposal.

"Everybody at IEEE P1901 is very disappointed with the lack of progress in the last months," Chano writes.

I have emails out to the 1901 chair and HomePlug reps. If you have a view, post a comment or drop a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com

Chapter and VersaPHY on 1394

2008-02-25T18:40:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Richard Mourn from Quantum Parametrics for providing some color about the recently announced VersaPHY specification from the 1394 Trade Association.

Mourn says the spec aims to help a single 1394 link typically used for high bandwidth streaming media apps branch out to cover less demanding apps that might range from speakers and security cameras to sensors.

"If a car seat has an LCD display in the head rest and the display is 1394, through VersaPHY the PHY in the LCD display [also] could service the seat belt sensor, the occupied sensor, the temperature sensor, etc. All of this would be done using the one 1394 cable into the seat," he writes.

The technique works by creating addressing labels so devices can plug into a link automatically. It requires no new hardware, however users need to agree to some standards. An effort is underway to set such standards for power management uses in cars, Mourn says.

10G gets new options

2008-02-25T14:58:00.000-08:00

Neterion rolls its X3100 series chips today at VMworld Europe, the first chips to support the NetQueue technology of VMware and the PCI SIG's I/O Virtualization. One analyst said the move could accelerate the slow ramp for 10G Ethernet.

But as reported today, competitors such as ServerEngines and NetXen are poised to leap to the IOV standard and Gen2 Express soon. And they have an edge in supporting storage capabilities such as iSCSI.

Beyond the battle of Ethernet and Infiniband controllers, the competition to define the optimal cabling for data centers and central offices is heating up. Startup Lightwire's release at the Optical Fibre Conference of a new CMOS optical transceiver with low power characteristics is one of many new active cable components to roll out in the past year.

The sheer variety of chip and cable options suggests there are still quite a lot of unknowns about how to best build and wire big back end facilities for 10G.

Rx for Moto

2008-02-20T18:35:00.000-08:00

Yowza, Eric Broockman's from-the-hip analysis of Moto's cellular problems stings true.

"Ed Zander’s mistake was to believe that a simple reorg or two together with a few interviews and snappy slogans would be sufficient to fundamentally remake a non-competitive corporate culture," he writes in his blog.

He notes how Moto designers slavish copied the successful Razr rather than dare to innovate with follow on products, and recalls how Moto flubbed a chance to co-develop a music phone with Apple before Steve Jobs & Co. went on to define the iPhone.

"The Schaumburg guys and corporate types from the cornfields outside of Chicago knew better than Steve Jobs did. They didn’t get the vision. So, Apple went elsewhere. Ouch. What a lost opportunity," he quips.

There's no quick solution to the deep-seated culture problems at Moto that extended to the non-competitive wireless chip unit at now spun out Freescale, he claims. OK, here's my vote for Eric as the next CEO of the new Moto.

HDMI in your hand

2008-02-19T20:51:00.000-08:00

The recent Mobile World Congress was ripe with demos of high def video captured on a cellphone and sent to a TV, according to my boss Junko Yoshida, just back from the show. Junko reports on a 65nm HDMI core from MIPS Technologies to make such a link.

The MIPS core competes with an HDMI variant that Silicon Image rolled out at CES. Silicon Image used clever design rather than aggressive process technology to solve the problem.

Junko reports that NXP Semi has licensed the MIPS core. I have noticed other recent cellular chip sets using a full HDMI core. Yet to appear are any design wins for the new Silicon Image approach.

I wrote recently that USB 3.0 might replace HDMI, mbile and otherwise, but other bloggers disagreed. In the march to high def everything, the protected cellular link is perhaps the most bleeding edge of applications.

Sun still shines on IB

2008-02-14T12:28:00.000-08:00

I was humbled when Valley vet Andy Bechtolsheim sought me out after a Sun Microsystems press conference yesterday. I had just asked Sun's systems VP John Fowler a question about unified data center networking and he pledged to ship such products on Infiniband in 2008.

Bechtolsheim wanted to make sure I knew all the technical advantages of IB as a unified net (high bandwidth, lower latency, built in resilience) and the downside of the FCoE effort (standards not done being the biggie).

It was interesting to hear Bechtolsheim point out weakness in his former employer (Cisco) than could trip it up in the push toward unified Ethernet nets, especially given he had made more than a few million when the networking giant bought his Ethernet startup in the boom days.

Just another example that technologies can look very different depending on where you sit at the moment. I expect Ethernet will become the unified net and that it will be slooooow getting there. I also expect Sun will be finding interesting technology arbitrage positions as long as savvy CEOs like Jonathan Schwartz can keep smart folks like Bechtolsheim on board.

Steps to converged Ethernet

2008-02-13T05:27:00.000-08:00

The vision of a converged Ethernet net in the data center continues to be a moving target, but chip makers are moving toward it. NetXen, ServerEngines and others are moving to 5 GHZ PCI Express and the Express I/O virtualization standard. Their efforts will help deliver better throughput for their 10G Ethernet chips.

But still out on the horizon is the Fibre Channel over Ethernet standard which reported progress yesterday. By this time next year I expect these companies and their counterparts will be announcing support for FCoE.

Meanwhile the software development efforts are “massive,” according to Kim Brown of ServerEngines. Case in point: the company’s chip was complete in March 2006 and its initial software for TOE and iSCSI shipped last month. Oi vay!

Bluetooth hops on the Wi-Fi bus

2008-02-11T12:04:00.000-08:00

The bus to the ultrawidband nirvana of Gbit/s+ data rates is taking too long. So the Bluetooth SIG has opted to use the transport independent version of it protocol ride 802.11 as well.

That version of Bluetooth won’t even be available to members until mid-2009, which begs the question of why the group announced this now. My guess is they are trying to hold off interest in other technologies such as 60 GHz radios which had quite a coming out at CES for wired systems. Academics are already working hot and heavy on versions of 60 GHz technology suitable for mobile devices.

Another interesting wrinkle is that the group is only looking to support .11abg and .11n support is not even on the road map for now. That seems to conflict with the stated goal of getting quickly to higher bandwidth, but perhaps broad adoption is a bigger driver than the highest possible speed.

The news amounts to one more sock in the gut for UWB. The wireless USB version has been dogged by low data rates. Regulatory issues mean OEMs need to have different configurations for different markets. Meanwhile design wins have been more a trickle of experiments than the predicted flood.

Diverging prescriptions

2008-02-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

At last week’s ISSCC, I heard engineers in medical electronics pitch for just about every form of wireless networking imaginable.

Medtronic said it’s happy with the 400 MHz MICS standard for its implants. Toumaz Technology said it needs a custom design to hit its ultra low cost and power targets. A UC researcher said he needs high bandwidth to capture brain signals and that is leading him to ultrawideband. Another academic said he needs to resolve underlying issues of capturing individual signals before he can even consider wireless.

This diversity does not bode well for an emerging IEEE effort to set standards for body area networks that hopes to embrace not only medical but consumer uses as well. The good news is there is plenty of room for technology development and adoption where medical meets wireless.

Got a hottie for Hoti?

2008-02-10T19:31:00.000-08:00

Believe it or not, it’s time to get in a submission for the annual IEEE Hot Interconnects conference at Stanford which runs August 6-8 this year. The committee is looking for “state-of-the-art hardware and software architectures and implementations” in a broad range of areas including but not limited to on-chip, chip-to-chip and network interconnects for silicon, copper and optical transports.

If you got a candidate send it by March 1 to the link found at the conference Web site. I’d be pleased as punch if you sent an FYI on what you are up to my way as well at rbmerrit@cmp.com.

Academics crank on 60 GHz

2008-02-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

Clearly 60 GHz design has hit the radar screen. Three leading research organizations came to ISSCC talking about 60 GHz advances.

The most significant move came from Belgium’s IMEC which described a digital CMOS receiver antenna to limit high-path signal loss. The dual-antenna device uses a programmable phase shift and integrates a low-noise amp and down converter. IMEC’s next step is to use 45nm technology to craft a four-antenna device that integrates a phase-lock loop and ADC.

IMEC is inviting the industry to join its research efforts. Back in the U.S., Berkeley’s labs have already spawned what appears to be the early leader in the field, SiBeam. But the startup’s initial products are aimed at wired-only systems.

Graduate students from Berkeley and UCLA came to ISSCC showing low-power 60 GHz receivers dissipating as little as 24 mW and thus suitable for battery-driven devices. But the 60 GHz transmitters eat perhaps twice as much power, and both researchers are still in early stages of designing full transceiver to bring 60 GHz to mobile systems.

Pinching pennies

2008-02-07T07:37:00.000-08:00

It’s an old trick in the semiconductor game, shrinking costs with silicon integration to compete taking products to mass market. Kudos to Atheros, SMSC and STMicro who gave examples in the last 24 hours of doing this with 802.11n, Bluetooth, USB 2.0 and WiMax.

Atheros presented papers yesterday at ISSCC on what it calls it’s the first 802.11n chip with baseband and radio on chip. It knows competit0ors are not far away with its part which should ship soon. Similarly it described its first Bluetooth 2.1 chip, and integrated part slightly smaller than the one from competitors such as Broadcom.

SMSC today shrinks its USB 2.0 transceiver to new size and power lows, hitting a sub-$1 cost for the first time. The company is talking just a little about nits views on the still-emerging USB 3.0, a topic I’d like to hear more about.

For its part, STM showed the first steps in research toward blending .11n and WiMax into an integrated chip suitable for a cellphone. The company has work to do yet before it pulls this one off, but it got plenty of attention at ISSCC for its efforts so far.

Seeking a body-friendly net

2008-02-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

A relatively new IEEE group (802.15.6) has put out a call for proposals for body-area network technology. They seek a “standard optimized for low power devices and operation on, in or around the human [or animal] body to serve a variety of applications including medical, consumer electronics and more.”

Tech requirements include support for a quality of service scheme, extremely low power, and data rates up to 10 Mbits/s. In addition, applications need to consider the so-called Specific Absorption Rate of different body types. They must also respect limits for transmit power in US to less than 1.6 mW and in EU to less than 20 mW.

The group aims to attract to its March meeting in Orlando giant medical electronic and consumer companies to weigh in on what they think will be the big apps for a wireless BAN and the technologies required to serve them. “This is a personal area network with the characteristics of the body in mind,” said Arthur Astrin who chairs the group.

I bumped into Astrin in a medical electronics session at ISSCC this week. Plenty of candidates for this work here i9ncluding developers of wristwatches and disposable band-aids that act as wireless monitors, deep brain implants and much more.

It could be a decade too early, but I think this will be one of the most interesting new wireless areas to watch.

Will USB 3.0 overwhelm HDMI?

2008-02-01T16:46:00.000-08:00

That’s what at least one attendee was wondering after the first industry review of the draft USB 3.0 spec. A group of as many as 300 came to the two-day, closed-door event in San Jose last week to hear the latest about the emerging Super Speed USB which aims to hit data rates up to 5 Gbits/second.

“I have attended two or three wireless USB events, and they were not as big as this. Almost everyone I know in the supply chain was there,” said Mark Fu, director of marketing for the connectivity group at SMSC which makes USB transceivers.

“There are a lot of things you can do with 5 Gbits/s such as carry uncompressed video, so I wonder whether this will challenge HDMI,” said Fu.

Interesting thought, given the fact last year Intel bailed on the UDI effort Silicon Image created to get HDMI into PCs and mobile systems. Although HDMI is well entrenched in HDTVs, it is looking less like an industry standard and more like a Silicon Image standard every day. And wouldn’t OEMs prefer one link (USB) that handles everything?

External hard and solid-state drives could use the target 300 Mbytes/s throughput for USB 3.0 as an alternative to external serial ATA, too.

“That’s almost as fast as SATA II,” Fu said.

Any challenge is a ways off. The 3.0 spec is only at a 0.78 version, although Intel hopes to have it complete in June.

“The way they talked about the connectors, EMI issues and other concepts you got the impression they have done a lot of work in the lab and this is not just a paper spec,” said Fu.

Indeed, Intel has some basic USB 3.0 hardware running the lab. There was a lot of back-and-forth in the San Jose meeting about cable issues—such as whether to consolidate USB 3.0 to just one micro-B style connector—the basic PHY, link and protocol aspects of the spec “seemed pretty solid,” said Fu.

I said before USB 3.0 will douse whatever heat Firewire is still generating. Now maybe a broader story about USB uber alles is in the making.

I reached out to the Intel and USB-IF folks for more today, but hey it’s Friday. I didn’t hear back. If anyone else at the big meeting has any comments to lend, go ahead and post them here or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com

Will cameras play tag?

2008-02-01T11:01:00.000-08:00

That’s what IMS Research believes forecasting that the market for cameras with integrated Global Positioning Systems capabilities will grow 200 percent on a compound annual basis over the next five years--coming off a very small sub-million unit base, of course. Makers of digital cameras and GPS chips are both hungry to open up new opportunities. But I think the marketing geniuses have more work ahead to flesh out this concept of geo-tagging pictures and turn it into a compelling use case.

Matia Grossi, author of the IMS report, does well to note that camera makers believe GPS chips are “too power hungry, too expensive and take too long to get a location fix.”

New approaches aim to address those issues, according to the report. The Snapspot software from NXP-spinout Geotate turns on a GPS receiver only for a fraction of a second while the user takes a picture. Air Semiconductor’s Airwave-1 keeps the receiver always on, drawing 1mA average and dynamically balancing accuracy with power based on the application.

Don’t expect many GPS-enabled cameras at the PMA conference in Vegas, but there’s enough activity to suggest they will come along eventually, Grossi concludes.

Power pinches everybody

2008-01-31T16:40:00.000-08:00

I’ve heard a hat trick of power problems this week. In 10G Ethernet, signaling and modeling—everywhere you turn—power is increasingly a key constraint.

A chief technologist at Solarflare wrote a somewhat rambling treatise that concludes there is no power budget for running TCP offload on 10Gbit Ethernet chips for the foreseeable future. That’s a somewhat self-serving conclusion, but at least he was specific about the numbers.

TOE-enabled chips will consume about 16W in 130nm or 10W in 65nm—two hot for 2008-class dual-ported products, he said. By contrast, chips that push the TCP stack to a host CPU will dissipate 5 and 4W respectively in 130 and 65nm technology, he said. If anybody wants to take issue with those numbers, let’s have at it. iWarp people, sound off!

Separately, HP fellow Terry Morris said the DesignCon organizers spent much of their time trying to figure out how to cover the hot topic of co-design to handle the increasing merger of power, signaling and timing issues for chip, board and systems engineers. Power effects at multi-gigabit speeds have to be part of the design analysis and there are no standard tools to do this, he said. EDA vendors, whatcha got to say about those beans?

Last but not least I heard Grant Martin, chief scientist at Tensilica, today say that one of the big issues in the new virtual prototyping style of design is a lack of energy models.

"We are much farther behind in this area," Martin said. "We have done some things with energy modeling for our devices at Tensilica, but you really need to know about the energy models for other devices in a system—so we need lots of friends," he added.

OK, so go sign up as friends at Grant’s MySpace page, and let’s get an industry consortium going on this issue, too.

Dialing Jack in the phone

2008-01-30T22:28:00.000-08:00

Sprint is giving 230 people in the San Francisco area cellphones equipped with near-field communications chips as part of a new service trial. Participants will be able to automatically buy tickets for the local mass transit system and pay for food at Jack in the Box fast food joints using NFC.

Users will be able to forget about subway tickets as long as they have their phone in their pocket. They will also be able to waive the phone in front of Jack in the Box smart ads in the subway station to get directions to the nearest outlet.

I suspect participants in the four-month trial will find it a fun novelty, but building a more interesting eco-system is the big issue. The people who use the latest cellphone features are not typically mass transit riders ordering fries at Jack in the Box.

Surely Sprint can learn a few things from these 230 users who will spread the word to others about NFC. But the road to making it interesting to use your phone in place of your debit/credit card is easy to see and hard to pave. Sprint must get a world of service providers to sign on to NFC pay-by-phone services, replace that world of magnetic stripe systems we all rely on these days and put up a bunch of smart ads, kiosks and services.

That’s going to be a lot more crucial than any trial and take a lot longer than four months.

ISSCC goes wireless

2008-01-29T18:18:00.000-08:00

Intel and Atheros will square off next week at ISSCC when they both describe their latest 802.11n Wi-Fi chips. As usual, Intel has the edge in process technology using 90nm design rules for a 1x2 MIMO transceiver with integrated filters and power amp. But the 130nm Atheros part is no slouch with 2x2 MIMO and at least a similar level of integration.

STMicro will give a peak at the future with papers on a separate transmitter and receiver that handles Wi-Fi and WiMax at 2.4-2.7 GHz bands. Made in 65nm technology, the designs point the way to the kind of integrated comms parts Intel says it is planning for future Centrino notebooks.

Also of note in wireless, I see Georgia Institute of Tech will describe a 60 GHz radio in 90nm CMOS that consumes just 200mW but can kick out data at rates of 7-15 Gbits/s. It’s just an academic design, mind you, but the first 60 GHz radio I have seen described outside of the work of startup SiBeam which was one of the wireless stars of the recent CES.

Portland’s Ethernet espresso

2008-01-28T14:44:00.000-08:00

It’s still early days for the next big step in Ethernet networking, the leap to 40 and 100G standards. But the newly approved IEEE P802.3ba task force is on the case and hopes to have a cogent draft by this fall.

A look at the group’s agenda from Portland last week shows they have been drinking double espresso. The agenda included more than 30 presentations from a wide variety of players including top dogs such as Alcatel, Broadcom, Cisco—the ABCs of Ethernet.

Interestingly, HuaWei is stepping up to take a significant role in the committee and is making solid technical proposals. The days of hacking on Cisco code are over for this emerging powerhouse.

Defining a common electrical interface has become one early issue for the standard. Joel Goergen of Force 10 Networks did a good job advocating for using the practical 4x10G and 10x10G links initially, moving to 4x25G in future—and maybe some 10x3 or 8x6 action in the medium term. Leveraging the 10GBase-KR standard for serial 10G links and getting in step with the Optical Internetworking Forum’s efforts on 25G will be key, according to Goergen.

If there are broader issues that need to be aired here, I am all ears. Post a note or drop a line to rbmerrit@cmp.com. In the meantime...Man, I am going to have get me some of that good Portland coffee!

At ISSCC: No magicians for 10GE

2008-01-26T18:35:00.000-08:00

10G Ethernet needs some pushing with the costs still relatively high for optical versions and the power consumption still too high for copper. That’s supposed to start shifting in 2008, and the upcoming ISSCC conference in San Francisco may be the place to get the first glimpse of the prospects.

Based on the sketchy abstracts I have on hand, it’s hard to tell what the horizon looks like. Startup Teranetics will describe a 130nm chip that drives 10G Ethernet over 100 meters of UTP, but it burns a fairly hefty 10.5W doing it. And though made in a mainstream 130nm process, it still requires two fairly large blocks--a 55mm-squared analog front end and a 150mm-squared digital processor. What’s more the abstract does not say which flavor of UTP they are using, probably a pricey Cat7.

Startup Aeluros will describe a protocol-independent serial 10G transmitter using a three-tap filter for use in optical cables or backplanes that eats just 165 mW. But it doesn’t sound like it’s for copper cables and there is no word about a full transceiver.

Well, there are a lot of really smart engineers behind these ISSCC papers, but they are engineers after all—not magicians.

Optical home nets?

2008-01-24T10:30:00.000-08:00

That’s what the man said. Admittedly the man was Bob Whitman whose job is to develop new business opportunities for Corning, a leading maker of fibre optical cables. And admittedly it was a minor side point, heavily qualified, as part of a presentation focused on fibre-to-the home (FTTH) networks which are what really have Bob excited these days.

But that’s what the man said. And I repeat: “Until recently we haven’t even considered an in-home market for fibre, but we are beginning to think about it now,” he said.

I wrote on Monday that chip makers are saying the next-generation of systems that terminate a FTTH network will be integrated with residential gateways, making them a sort of Trojan Horse for optical in the home. However, those systems expect to link to copper and wireless home nets.

For ten years home nets have been living under the dictate “no new wires.” I don’t expect the Corning folks to get any reprieve from that guidance until there is such salivating demand for an application so high in bandwidth that no cleaver modulation over wireless, copper or even coax can cost effectively meet it.

The shape of phones to come?

2008-01-23T19:24:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow’s cellphones could sport as many as eight radios and require up to 11 antennas, according to Sudhir Dixit, head of network technology for Nokia Siemens Networks, speaking in a presentation at Photonics West today. “There’s an antenna jangle out there,” he said.

The radios included Bluetooth, multi-mode and frequency cellular (with four antennas), DVB-H, FM, GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi and ultrawideband. Dixit, an IEEE Fellow, called for new strides in miniaturization. Without them that future phone might need to dedicate a whopping 25 percent of its area to antennas and radios, he added.

The Nokia Siemens tech exec is admittedly making an extreme case that’s not likely to be on the engineer’s benchtop anytime soon. Similarly his projections of future phones with VGA resolutions on OLED screens and Gbytes of memory was a bit beyond the pale.

That said, we’ve been watching a slow motion explosion in wireless technologies over the last decade. The trend line Dixit outlined is real, even if the details may be a bit exaggerated for affect.

Starting on an upbeat note

2008-01-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

By 2012, more than 71 million homes worldwide will be outfitted with home networks thanks to a residential gateway box from a major carrier. That’s the prediction from a new study called “Networks in the Home” released by Parks Associates this morning.

Interestingly it looks like most of those boxes will be in Europe, according to Parks. Hmmmm, maybe Europe's carriers will pull a GSM when it comes to home nets and drive standards toward their favorite powerline technology.

Carriers are most interested in providing features such as multi-room digital video recording, streaming media and home monitoring, the report adds. A secondary goal is getting remote management technology into the home so they can more easily fix problems and up-sell services, according to the report.

That all rings true but, as usual for the market research world, probably a little optimistic on the 70 million figure. Anyway, after a decade of talk about home networking, it does look like it is sloooowly beginning to happen with carriers such as Verizon delivering more than one million gateways equipped with Multimedia over Coax and AT&T installing a fair amount of HPNA as well.

One of the next knee-jerk questions is when will they start cranking up the volume on bandwidth. A Verizon spokesman at a November event told me they are planning to move to multi-Gbit optical links soon so they are requesting MoCA quickly shift to 400 Mbits/second. A handful of chip makers are optimistically hoping this shift to Gigabit PON networks and unified boxes that marry the optical link to the home net kicks in big time in 2008.

Separately, over in the data center, Emulex is validating the N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) industry standard as the basis for virtualization in its products. At a Cisco event, Emulex is showing the technology across a range of high end data-center networking boards including a 10Gbit/s board for Fibre Channel over Ethernet. Unless I missed something, this FCoE board is still a prototype product. But it’s a good indication of progress on the technology if such products are now broadly getting demonstrated at industry events.

Everywhere I turn this morning there’s just a little bit of hope about new technologies for the new year. While stock markets dive into fears of recession, this is good news.

Catching a lightning bolt

2008-01-17T17:52:00.000-08:00

Flipping through my daytimer, I see DesignCon is just a couple weeks away. So, it’s time for me to get up to speed--as it were--about all the issues pushing backplanes and transceivers to the bleeding edge and beyond. If you live and breathe this fiery stuff, drop me a note at rbmerrit@cmp.com to let me know what’s keeping you up at night.

There’s no doubt the need for speed continues to send a plume of smoke up form engineers gathered at this event. Lee Goldberg will host an interesting panel on the move to 20-25 Gbit/second backplane links. My colleague Loring Wirbel will gather thought leaders from the applications world to talk about the drive to 100 Gbit/s networks.

Bring a fire extinguisher.

Interconnects on the go

2008-01-16T17:19:00.000-08:00

I attended a panel of car and plane electronics makers at the Consumer Electronics Show this month that gave some insights into some of their most pressing interconnect issues.

Bill Mattingly, a vice president for electronics at Chrysler, said car makers need standard interfaces for consumer electronics—at least at the physical layer. “We can accept the fact we need to do protocol updates every year,” he said.

Gary Jablonski, a development manager for infotainment systems at Ford, said he expects to leverage more PC standards while waiting for car industry efforts. USB has already become the de factor audio interface for cars, he added.

A representative from an avionics company said car and plane makers need to agree on a video interface because USB is not adequate to the task. Choose wisely because it can cost a whopping $240 million to outfit a plane with new connectors, he added.

One after-market vendor said the industry needs a protocol to pause entertainment devices when the vehicle senses the driver is in a critical phase such as fast breaking or highway acceleration. “We need to get a standard for driver distraction,” he said.

Very basic reconfigurable radios to link to the outside world will also be critical, he added. Cars need to last twenty years and that may require spanning links from GSM to LTE or even WiMax, he said.

As for wireless inside the car, all sides said ultrawideband is a non-starter. “UWB has massive EMC problems in the car. It would be a nightmare,” said one panelist.

UWB and Bluetooth—due to its channel structure--are both not suitable for the airplane, said the avionics rep, although Wi-Fi is a maybe.

As if there were not enough problems, Chris Steiner, OEM sales manager at Garmin, said GPS makers have no common connector for their devices yet. “That’s one of the big challenges we, Magellan and others have ahead,” he said.

Not-so-universal remotes

2008-01-15T06:53:00.000-08:00

Here we go again. The consumer electronics industry has just gotten to the point where there is a wide range of universal remote controls available to supervise all your gear no matter who made it. But with the rise of digital, high def products the technology is about to take a new twist.

The folks behind the High Definition Multimedia Interface laid out a scheme called HDMI-CEC. The standard lets each consumer company establish a baseline of interoperability with each other’s digital high def remote control products with room left over to add on any proprietary bits if they wanted to put a few special features in their devices.

And sure enough that’s just what they have done—in spades. Consumer giants embraced HDMI-CEC in a big way at CES, each with their own spin on the spec so the devices would work best when you bought all your TVs, DVDs and other products from their brand. Thus Panasonic’s version of HDMI-CEC is VieraLink, LG’s is SimpLink, Samsung’s is AnyNet and so on. The net result is that if you really want to get a rich feature set you have to buy all Panasonic or LG or Samsung gear—a vendor wet dream that rarely happens in the real world.

I fail to understand why consumer companies did not adopt the Universal Plug and Play Forum’s standard for device discovery and control. It might require a little more software and a slightly stronger micro to run it, but it would enable anyone’s remote to talk fluently with anyone’s device. This is what users really want—not the all Sony or Philips home.

There’s still time to change—in the next generation. In fact the PC folks over at DisplayPort realized having a broadband back channel on their display interface would be a better alternative to the 100 Kbit/second HDMI-CEC link. They are now crafting an option that could mirror the 480 Mbits/s of USB 2.0.

So imagine, say five years from now, your Hewlett-Packard Universal remote might be able to use UPnP to automatically discover over wireless USB a Sony Blu-Ray player, an LG HDTV—maybe even an AppleTV box if Cupertino learns to cooperate--and automatically figure out how you can control them all. Ah, let’s hope all these children learn to play together nicely.

Serial ATA powers up

2008-01-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

The Serial ATA International Organization has begun work on a new specification that will provide power to external SATA devices without the need for a separate power connection, filling a small but significant hole in its coverage for the successful storage interconnect. Devices based on the spec could hit the market before the end of the year, enabling a new class of portable, external SATA hard disk and optical drives.

The new spec will provide power for a single drive directly from the host system using a Power-Over-eSATA cable. The cable will maintain compatibility with the existing eSATA connector form factor and the current maximum interface transfer rate of 3Gbits/second.

New life for 1394?

2008-01-11T13:08:00.000-08:00

Based on everything I heard before CES, I don’t hold out much hope for the future of 1394 as a mainstream conduit in the digital home. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the news from the show that the 1394 Trade Association has approved a spec for 1394 over coax using the ultrawideband technology of Pulse~Link as a physical layer transport.

The word is the group farted around waaaay too long getting the spec out. An expected election for new leadership later this month could shake things up and give the group some new leadership blood. I am told Cablevision is doing field tests of 1394 over coax as a home net technology.

There’s a little glint of sunlight there, but it might be just the on-coming train. Most cable and IPTV companies seem to be inclining toward the more mature MoCA, powerline and phoneline options and even there a lot of the work is only tests and trials for many companies. As far as I can tell 1394 is at the back of the line.

What's more, before the 1394 group could even get word out about approving its 3.2 Gbit/spec, the USB crowd had already pre-announced plans for USB 3.0 at 5 Gbits/s. An Intel booth minder at CES said more than 100 companies have signed up to help finish a USB 3.0 spec by midyear with a big meeting in San Jose on the topic next week. He expressed confidence the group can hit its 5 Gbit/s target.

HP on UWB, TV and cellular

2008-01-10T10:23:00.000-08:00

I had a chance to meet Phil McKinney, chief technologist of Hewlett-Packard’s personal systems group on the show floor of CES. Here are some quick outtakes from our talk:

HP plans to experiment with wireless USB this year, probably in just a couple products and focusing on external dongles. McKinney is a big believer in W-USB, in part, due to its good penetration characteristics, but he sees 2008 as a trial year for the technology.

On another front, Cable Labs, Microsoft and others are still struggling through problems delivering a two-way Cable Card for PCs using Windows Media PC software. McKinney said engineers are now exploring an option of using the Internet as the back channel for requesting video-on-demand and other interactive services for PC/TV systems.

That’s a logical move since the Media Center PCs are geared to be on the Net, typically over Wi-Fi. But how all this pans out with the cable TV roll out of their new interactive services remains to be seen.

HP still has an active cellphone business that grew out of its iPaq handheld businesses. One of the big challenges is getting integrated multi-mode RF chips to reduce the size and power consumption of the devices.

Security is also an issue preventing businesses from rolling out mobile apps on cellphones. As many as 10,000 handsets a month are left in cabs in Chicago alone, McKinney claimed. That drove HP to acquire Bitfone for its over-the-air software update technology which HP has upgraded so it can also remotely erase any data on a lost handset.

A latte with Qualcomm

2008-01-09T07:54:00.000-08:00

Late yesterday afternoon I was tired and trolling through the South Hall at CES when I spotted a barista station at the Qualcomm booth and pulled up for a nice latte made by the local San Diego coffee company Qualcomm brought up to Vegas. At the other end of the cafe bar stood CEO Paul Jacobs, so I made use of the serendipity and sidled over for a short, informal chat. Here are some outtakes from our coffee break:

Taking a view of the more cool things available for the cellphone the better, Jacobs says he welcomes local TV stations to the mobile broadcasting world Qualcomm is pursuing with its MediaFlo service. “Some people like to fight over the scraps, but I’d rather grow the whole pie,” he said.

He agreed with my observation the TV stations will find Hollywood knocking on their door for mobile royalties before they turn on the new services. “The hardest part of getting the MediaFlo service started was clearing the content rights,” he said.

Another nagging issue the local broadcasters face is understanding the black magic of getting good wireless coverage. The MediaFlo folks just finished a re-evaluation of some of their key markets, adding new base stations in spots where follow up surveys found coverage was spotty.

I asked Jacobs about the outlook for Qualcomm’s intellectual property revenues in the face of lean prospects for its next-generation of CDMA called Ultra Mobile Broadband (UMB). Verizon has decided to migrate from Qualcomm’s EV-DO technology to Long Term Evolution (LTE) rather than UMB. If other big carriers follow suit as expected, developers will have a more consistent GSM-like worldwide cellular environment, but Qualcomm could have a smaller royalty base.

Jacobs said Qualcomm has a lot of patents that read on LTE technology. He said he has not worked out all the numbers yet, but expects no steep falloff in IP revenues in the LTE era.

He added that one major customer has already signed an IP license that covers the LTE timeframe. He also noted that UMBs a couple goodies not in LTE. UMB has superior support for minimizing multipath interference problems in the ad hoc placement of picocells. Jacobs said he is a big believer in picocells in the 4G timeframe and LTE will not be an optimal solution for them.

I wished I would have seen yesterday’s article about a judge lambasting Qualcomm’s IP attorneys. That would have provided for a couple more interesting wrinkles for our conversation.

Instead, I finished my latte and headed back out to the CES show floor, hoping for other great chance encounters.

DisplayPort goes 1,2…TV?

2008-01-08T13:56:00.000-08:00

What a difference a year makes!

“Last year we had a folder of papers and promises, and today we have working products,” said Bob Myers, display technologist from Hewlett-Packard speaking at a press conference about DisplayPort at CES today.

I’ll file a full story tonight, but here’s the upshot for now: All major PC chip sets going forward will support DisplayPort and Intel will use it as the primary display link on its motherboards going forward. OEMs understand they can improve display quality and lower cost of LCD monitors by substituting DisplayPort for LVDS and DVI, so they are putting out purchase orders for timing controller chips that are about to go into production. Expect tens of millions of DisplayPort PCs, notebooks and monitors flying by this time next year.

That means next year TV engineers will be giving DisplayPort a serious look as an alternative to HDMI. It already has cost and simplicity advantages over LVDS for high-end TV displays. As an external interconnect it lacks the legal and royalty encumbrances of HDMI, and it sports a higher bandwidth back channel than the HDMI-CEC being used widely in HDTV sets shown here.

Of course, HDMI is not standing still. A new spec launched yesterday is driving the link into mobile systems.

But in typical PC fashion, the DisplayPort ecosystem is building fast. Chips are coming from Genesis, IDT, Parade, Genum and NXP. Dell showed a shipping display and Samsung demoed a native DisplayPort implementation.

The folks at VESA have focused on solving the problems with DVI, LVDS and VGA, said Bruce Montag, the Dell technologist who chairs the DisplayPort group. But in doing so they may have set the wheels in motion that will move into tomorrow’s TV sets as well. Stay tuned.

Mobile HDMI ready for prime time?

2008-01-07T06:40:00.000-08:00

I expect Silicon Image will finally debut today at CES a version of its High Definition Multimedia Interface for mobile devices such as digital cameras, portable media players and cellphones. The technology will face a rising tide of interest in a host of wireless options that are attracting the attention of consumer OEMs including ultrawideband, Wi-Fi and 60 GHz radios.

Silicon Image may sample as early as February chips for its Mobile High Definition Link. MHL pares down the three Transition Minimized Differential Signaling channels in a standard HDMI connection to just one. A streamlined transmitter is embedded in the mobile device and a full HDMI bridge chip is put in a separate wired cradle the OEM would have to design.

The result is a 2.25 Gbit/s link consuming 60 mW average on the mobile device and running over five pins that can be mapped to any existing connector on the device. It aims to carry up to full 1080-progressive video encrypted with HDMI's High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).

Silicon Image probably will not announce costs of the chips, which will be in production in late 2008. However total costs probably will be about the same as a full HDMI link on a TV. OEMs will have to pay the standard four cents per port HDMI royalty, and pass compliance tests at existing HDMI certification facilities.

The MHL work is based on an earlier design from Silicon Image called UDI originally aimed at PCs and notebooks. Computer makers decided to go their own route, developing the DisplayPort specification in the Video Electronics Standards Association—which has its own press conference at CES tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Silicon Image has been selling low power versions of its HDMI chips into high resolution video cameras for two years. MHL marks a significant expansion of that effort aiming for design wins in media players and cameras in 2008 and in cellphones as early as 2009.

Bluetooth sings at CES

2008-01-07T06:17:00.000-08:00

At long last Bluetooth is gaining traction as a wireless link for MP3 players. The audio spec for this narrowband wireless link has been bogged down for years, attracting competitors such as Kleer and Aura, but no more as of this Consumer Electronics Show.

Samsung debuted at CES yesterday a digital boom box that contains a hard disk drive to rip CDs without a PC. It also sports a Bluetooth link to grab music from its latest Bluetooth equipped MP3 players and cellphones which apparently debuted on the market last year.

“A key differentiator of our MP3 line is our Bluetooth connectivity,” said a Samsung exec in a press conference.

Apparently the company had not attended the Philips press conference just prior to its event. Philips launched a roughly similar audio player and MP3 systems with Bluetooth yesterday.

I don’t know what has held Bluetooth back all these years. If you do, drop me a comment here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com. The net result is MP3 players are going wireless. Hello, Cupertino, did you hear that? Better turn down your iPods and listen!

Wireless free for all

2008-01-06T17:26:00.000-08:00

Live from Vegas: My head is spinning from the “Death March” of pre-CES press conferences today. Among others things they confirm my suspicions that wireless video is not ready for prime time on digital TVs. Each major consumer electronics company trying out a different way forward and most are still in the stage of kicking the tires on the options. Here’s the quick-and-dirty rundown of who is doing what:

LG: Talking about wireless and “wireless ready” TVs generically. When asked they say it initially will be Wi-Fi but they are still exploring options.

Toshiba: Showing a demo their marketing VP thinks is based on 60 GHz radio, but he is not sure. Maybe the fall refresh will have a product commitment.

Philips: Working closely with Radiospire for wireless across all products. If all goes well products may flow in September.

Samsung: Demoing Wireless USB in TVs and digital cameras, but shipping Bluetooth on TVs (for MP3s?) and wired HDMI on HD cameras. They say next year they hope to have wireless USB on TVs, DVD recorders, printers, cameras—everything. They have selected multiple chip vendors, but will not say who they are.

Sharp: They are committing to wired powerline based on HomeNetAV (Intellon) in the US, though in Japan they have demoed some form of UWB.

Sony: Amimon just announced that Sony is demonstrating an HDTV using its proprietary variant of 802.11--no details yet on the nature of Sony's committment (or lack thereof) to the technology.

Panasonic: Perhaps the smartest of the group, they are touting sneaker net SD cards with slots on TVs, Blu-Ray players and cameras. Hey, it works and it’s here today. Their HD story is a 32 Gbyte SD HC card coming “soon” that can carry 5-8 hours of HD video.

If this is true, wireless video will probably ship in a bazillion products in 2009--and none of them will talk to each other. Oi vay!

More wireless wonders

2008-01-04T17:04:00.000-08:00

Another day, another flow of wireless vendors trying to rack up proof points on the road to CES.

Ultrawideband pioneer Pulse~Link is coming to CES with backing from Westinghouse that has embedded its UWB chips into an HDTV. The company also got a design win for its version of UWB over coax.

Pulse~Link says Westinghouse will use its UWB chips to carry HDMI signals in an HDTV set “planned for initial commercial release to the B2B digital signage market in Q2 2008.” Sounds like more of an image statement than a run at the mainstream of Circuit City to me, but a branded HDTV demo is a big step forward for the chip company that was just showing board-level demos at last CES.

Another company, Geffen, is launching a bridge for anyone who wants to extend HDMI signals around their home via the Pulse~Link UWB over coax solution. The Geffen box goes on sale in April.

Competitor Amimon is not naming names yet, but claims it will have a top-tier OEM showing its Wi-Fi variant embedded in an LCD HDTV at CES to send full 1080p video streams.

I will be hunting next week for real shipping products in mainstream markets using any of this stuff. But I suspect that will be the theme for CES 2009. This is the demo year for wireless video, I suspect.

Wireless video on parade

2008-01-03T07:37:00.000-08:00

Do you hear that sound? Everybody and his mother is coming to CES claiming they have the answer to sending high def video around the digital living room over wireless. Fact is, everybody wishes they had such a solution, and maybe someday a couple people will.

The latest news is the WirelessHD group has announced its 1.0 spec will be available this year. Don’t expect chip sets and compliance tests to come until at least midyear, making Xmas 2008 products a tight squeeze—if this technology succeeds.

WirelessHD requires a device discovery and control scheme separate from the widely used UPnP spec, which is not a good thing. And the initial chips will not be low power enough to get into battery operated devices such as digital cameras.

Startup Kleer will be demoing at CES its low power technology, a Bluetooth variant, but is not up to the high bandwidth, QoS and copy protection capabilities of WirelessHD. Belkin will demo at CES startup Amimon’s proprietary spin on Wi-Fi which falls somewhere in the middle of the two options. And of course there will be a mighty river of ultrawideband variants on hand.

At the end of the day, the whole idea of wireless video is still an unproven nice-to-have. Whether it will have sufficiently high quality and ease of use combined with low price to make it into tomorrow’s digital video systems remains to be seen.

The answer will be revealed not in cooked CES demos of wireless video. I saw them last year on UWB. What the technology needs is lots of proven silicon from multiple sources that hit the key metrics OEMs want.

I'm baaaack

2008-01-02T20:50:00.000-08:00

I hope you all have enjoyed re-connecting with friends and family as much as I have over the holidays. Now the rhythms of work begin again, and for me that means the volume is turning up on the drum beat of the Consumer Electronics Show. My email box is already bulging with CES pre-annoucements, invitations and spam.

I’ll be in Vegas from Sunday through Wednesday trying to take in as much as I can. Let me know if you have the skinny on something popping at CES or if you have a craving for some info I might dig out there.

FireWire fizzles

2007-12-20T11:10:00.000-08:00

We at EE Times have covered IEEE 1394 aka FireWire for years, but this patently good technology may be on its last legs.

I have a story coming in Monday’s paper (I hope) that quotes senior engineering management at both Sony and Moto saying—unprompted--its time to say bye-bye to this interconnect. Smacks of a kiss of death to me.

Brian O’Rourke of In-Stat noted the technology is good but has always been the second or third choice in any given market. It takes a back seat to USB in PCs, HDMI in TVs and set-tops and MOST in cars. A Rodney Dangerfield of interfaces!

Why? It used to be faster than any alternative. But I guess there wasn’t demand for its 400 Mbit/s data rate circa 1993. Then there was the dollar-per-port royalty from Apple that apparently thought this was a product not a technology. Then the FCC foisted it on unwilling cable-TV companies who put chips in boxes without ports. Oi vay!

Kudos to the 1394 Trade Association and their members for their candor and persistence with efforts like HANA. At CES, the HANA 2.0 software will be shown running premium content from NBC Universal from three cable-TV systems across five media types, and the group is talking up its long-planned 3.2 Gbit/s version.

But HDMI seems to have won the TV and set-top, we don’t need another home network type (especially not an interconnect masquerading as a network) and there are plenty of alternative links with speeds as fast, features as rich, power consumption as low and prices driven to the floor thanks to mass adoption--some of them are even wireless.

Sign of the times: I met an EE from one 1394 company at the MoCA conference last month scouting around for new growth opportunities. Maybe there is just one or two more stories to write about this technology—its demise and burial.

Life in Embargo City

2007-12-20T10:25:00.000-08:00

One of the hardest parts of my job is dealing with the reality distortion field. There are big things companies are doing—and mistakes they have made--that they don’t want to talk about publicly. Rather than be frank they with withhold or embargo information, ask you to sign NDAs or try to impress you with a content-free marketing tap dance.

Case in point: I know Silicon Image is doing some stuff in mobile and planning some stuff in networking. But there is some stuff I agreed I would not say (yet) and other stuff they will not say yet (unless you are a partner under NDA), and in the meantime a lot of spin in the form of fancy but vague Powerpoint to keep Wall Street interested in the stock.

Almost every company I deal with plays these games as part of doing business. Consortia do it too: Right now the USB-IF is not being fully forthcoming on their DTV-to-mobile plan-in-progress, and the people at Cable Labs and the CEA won’t say much about their networked OCAP and Digital Cable Ready-Plus plans.

Of course, I have my own part in this ecosystem, trying to get stories before anyone else does. It can be fun and useful, but sometimes it’s also frustrating on days when the information lockdown and marketing spin has me reeling. I guess those are the days when the little man behind the curtain who pretends to be the Great and Powerful Oz is having a good day.

The TV plug plot thickens

2007-12-14T17:28:00.000-08:00

Add the FireWire crowd to the mix of people trying to define the plug of choice in the digital living room. The 1394 Trade Association says it is aiming its new 3.2 Gbit/s spec at carrying uncompressed video. That's HDMI territory, baby.

Upping the ante, the trade group said it is working on a spec for 1394 over coax. Sounds like a home network play to me. That likely will compete with whatever Silicon Image has going on behind the curtain called the Personal Entertainment Network.

So, we have digital TVs adopting HDMI as a de facto standard, set-tops with FireWire --thanks to the FCC requirement for a copy-protected interface--and the world of PCs, cameras and cellphones wearing various sizes of USB--plus a new USB variant in the works for carrying compressed video between TVs and devices. I love a good mud fight!

HDMI and USB fight over TV

2007-12-13T10:33:00.000-08:00

This is like one of those living room battles over who gets the remote control.

I am told the USB Implementers Forum is working on a version of USB that aims to link mobile devices to TVs. The spec is supposed to be out sometime in 2008. A USB-IF spokeswoman said the new spec aims to carry compressed high def video and should complement HDMI. I don't have much hard data on this, so I welcome any comments on it posted here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com

The interesting wrinkle here is that while USB has got significant traction in digital cameras and is starting to take hold in cellphones, it ain't nowhere to be seen in TVs. That's the terrain of HDMI, and Silicon Image, HDMI's backer, has been showing the financial community foils about how it sees mobile devices like cameras and cellphones as its next big expansion area.

Of course these wired guys will have to tussle with all the wireless options springing up as well—Wi-Fi and its derivatives, Bluetooth and derivatives, UWB and 60 GHz radios to name the main ones. This cat fight alone could make for an interesting CES next month.

The UWB crew reacts

2007-12-13T10:19:00.000-08:00

Jack Shandle over at Wireless Designline has a good rundown of the reactions the ultrawideband crew are having to the report this week on the underwhelming data rates for wireless USB. His discussion of the unresolved issues around detect-and-avoid strategies and multi-frequency support is particularly cogent.

I had a chat myself with Stephan Wood, president of the WiMedia Alliance, yesterday for a story I was working on. I applaud his idea of the industry proactively planning use of unlicensed spectrum so a lot of sub-optimal devices don't swap the airwaves.

But I have to note Wood's notion of possibly reserving 60 GHz for uncompressed video and UWB bands for compressed video sounds suspiciously like a way to carve the pie without leaving much for the Wi-Fi that is the best established and perhaps most proactive of all wireless camps these days with its Gbit effort well on its way.

What's more, like it or not, we live in a capitalist techno-democracy where anyone can field anything and consumers vote with their dollars about what wins. That isn't always the prettiest or shortest route and it doesn't always favor the optimal technology, but that's the way the game is played.

Bad grades for wireless USB

2007-12-11T16:33:00.000-08:00

OK, wireless USB promoters, you are grounded until you get those data rates up. The official tests results from Octoscope are in. They are better than the 20 Mbits/s the group was reporting initially back in October. But the 50 Mbit/s results of the final scores are still not up to par—go back and hit the books, people. Remember, even though you are a big consortium there are plenty of competitors who want to eat your lunch.

Mike Foley of the Bluetooth SIG says his group is still optimistic it can ride UWB to get to a 100 Mbit/s application layer data rate with BT 3.0. The wireless USB problems according to the BT people stem mainly from the USB protocol itself which Mike called "not friendly for wireless, they are too chatty and that impacts data throughput and power consumption."

BT 3.0 will use its existing radio as a control channel, only turning on a UWB radio when big chucks of data are ready to be sent. And BT 3.0 will tap into 6 GHz frequencies as well, he added.

More PAN-demonium

2007-12-11T16:22:00.000-08:00

I hear startup Kleer hopes to make a splash at CES in January with its proprietary alternative to Bluetooth used last year in MP3 players from Thomson. But I have yet to see a solid technical analysis comparing Kleer's technology to Bluetooth. If you have some data on this, please post a comment or email me at rbmerrit@cmp.com

I am also still waiting for word on a Wibree killer in the works from Qualcomm. The company said earlier this year it has something in the labs. But I have yet to see any details leak out on it.

STM sees DTV, DisplayPort at its Genesis

2007-12-11T11:40:00.000-08:00

Good timing for STMicro today, offering to snap up Genesis MicroChip for an estimated $336 million. The industry is on a significant ramp in LCD TVs and digital TVs, as well as the DisplayPort interface Genesis helped pioneer that will appear inside many of those devices. The acquisition will help STM grab a bigger share of the growing market.

Long term the duo will have some nice integration plays, and STM could use Genesis' DisplayPort technology to expand its business in PCs. In the short term, STM may see an opportunity to reduce some redundant costs and make the Genesis parts even more profitable. But even without cuts, this is a good deal. Genesis reported sales of $191 million in the past year, has top-drawer customers such as Dell and Samsung and a nice pile of some 210 patents.

Express gets a tune up

2007-12-07T23:31:00.000-08:00

I got a flame today saying the comment in my previous post about Intel's Geneseo being a candidate for PCI Express version 3.0 was off the mark.

"Geneseo does not exist other than as an Intel marketing term, a term never recognized by the PCI SIG. All of the SIG proposals have seen extensive discussion and modifications" from multiple companies, he said.

The comment led to more back and forth and discussions with another source. It all helped me get a somewhat clearer picture of the work on PCI extensions over at the PCI SIG which I posted as a story on the EE Times site tonight.

Clearly, I have yet to get a sense of many of the details of the new extensions in the works for Express. No doubt I'll be hearing more from the SIG in the new year—if not sooner. Stay tuned.

Inside the x86

2007-12-05T22:47:00.000-08:00

A week or so ago I asked readers if they had any skinny on Intel's thinking about SoC interconnects. I didn't hear anything back, but the reality is I have a fair amount of background on the subject…and I learned some interesting new wrinkles doing a report to appear at EE Times on Monday.

What I already knew: Intel has announced its Quick Path Interconnect as a upgrade for its front-side bus to appear in Nehalem CPUs starting in 2008. It is only for the hardy few co-processor types who need a fully coherent link. The Geneseo technology it is developing as a candidate for PCI Express 3.0 is the link for everybody else.

What I have learned: In addition to these external on-chip interconnects, there is one or more internal Intel interconnects the company plans to support.

What's more I also talked to Chuck Moore of AMD about their use of coherent and non-coherent HyperTransport links as their main SoC boulevards. Intel and AMD have clearly been courting third parties to hop on their different buses. Chuck said these two pairs of links are probably all anyone will ever see in the emerging world of x86 interconnects.

But "an interesting question is how these two pairs of standards will start to mingle," he said, suggesting multi-protocol links serving multiple purposes.

In addition, "there could be interesting protocol extensions beyond coherency for the next generation of HyperTransport," Moore added. Rather than communicating and synchronizing through memory, devices could link up in ways that "are more optimal," Moore said.

Just remember, dear readers, for this strategic peek into the future of X86 SoCs I charge you all of zero dollars. So, next time I ask for a tip, please drop a line or post a note to keep this little economy flowing, mon freres.

Cellular cracks open

2007-12-04T18:39:00.000-08:00

The biggest interconnect story of the next few years may be the move to open cellular networks, creating the rough equivalent of a mobile Internet. Jake MacLeod, CTO at Bechtel Comms and an old hand in building cellular nets, thinks it is inevitable today's nets tightly controller by carriers will ultimately become open.

"What Google and other new entrants want is access to mobile customers," he told me in an interview for a story posted today. "They have a right to provide them mobility services that don’t have to be tied to an AT&T, Verizon or T-Mobile."

Google has "a very creative play that will be met with a lot of resistance, but if they are successful they could change the face of communications," he said.

Verizon Wireless took a step in this direction stating last week it would open its network to any complaint device starting in 2008. Whoever gets the 700 MHz spectrum up for auction next week could push the trend further, given the FCC's mandate for open access on at least some of those airwaves.

Have any skinny on the details for compliance with Verizon? Got an opinion or rant on cellular nets? Sound off with a posting here or at rbmerrit@cmp.com

DisplayPort gathers steam

2007-12-02T21:18:00.000-08:00

DisplayPort backers gather in San Francisco this week for the third plugfest for the standard written by the Video Electronics Standards Association. The interface has been slowly gathering steam since a critical mass of vendors officially got behind the spec at CES in January. Bob Meyers, the HP display guru chairing the standard effort, said this year's CES will show an even broader group of proponents, products and prototypes—as well as an update on plans for a two-stage upgrade path.

Foreshadowing the rise of this new interconnect, Integrated Device Technology announced today it has created a new digital display division focused on chips for DisplayPort standard. The company has five DisplayPort parts in the works, but has yet to start sampling any of them.

An IDT spokesman said DisplayPort is not only being used as an external PC interface but is also replacing LVDS as an internal link inside notebooks and LCD TVs. He estimated it could appear in 300 million PCs and 100 million consumer systems by 2010.

Wi-Fi for sensor nets?

2007-11-30T15:31:00.000-08:00

That's the case GainSpan made over lunch to me the other day. Zigbee, the startup claims, lacks links to network management software such as HP's OpenView and IBM's Tivoli. Existing Zigbee nodes from the likes of Ember, Dust, Crossbow and others lack the interoperable gateways prevalent in the 802.11 world. And some apps need the 1-2 Mbits/s GainSpan's 11b/g Wi-Fi chip can crank out when needed—and still deliver the 3-5 year battery life required of a sensor node.

I hope to dig into this a bit further next week. If you are working in sensor nets with Zigbee, Wi-Fi or some other net, I'd like to hear your thoughts. Drop a comment or email me at rbmerrit@cmp.com

Intuitive Networks

2007-11-29T17:13:00.000-08:00

I am very familiar with the automated data center concepts promoted by the likes of IBM and HP under titles like Autonomic Computing and Lights Out Computing. But it wasn't until I got a copy of the in-house technical magazine from Bechtel Communications that I had heard about a similar idea in networking.

Jake MacLeod, the affable CTO over there, has an excellent article in the issue describing the concept in detail. He says an intuitive network includes:

* Base station "hotels" that house many types of transceivers
* Sophisticated multiple antenna subsystem
* Sensor networks to help determine when to reallocate resources
* Lotsa network management software

It could take decades to learn how to build really great intuitive networks, Jake suggests. Along the way, engineers have lots to learn about interconnected networks of networks that handle personal identity securely and handle location data across distributed system. There are also big challenges in distributed quality of service.

Sounds like the folks at Bechtel and a few other dozen companies have their work cut out for them.

No new wires?

2007-11-27T16:08:00.000-08:00

According to a survey released today by Parks Associates half of the homes that link a computer to a stereo or TV use RCA and S-video cables. Hey whatever happened to the no-new-wires initiative?

Apparently what happened was a slew of mediocre and hard-to-install digital media adapters and networks. What's even worse is that only nine percent of homes using broadband had links between a computer and a stereo and only four percent hand links between a computer and TV. In the ago of the iPod and YouTube, the space between the PC and the entertainment center looks like the Grand Canyon.

Battling bottleneck breakers

2007-11-26T09:19:00.000-08:00

Rambus and IBM are squaring off on whether it's better to bust through the memory bottleneck with new signaling or packaging technologies. Both approaches look like contenders in the 2010 timeframe.

Our EE Times report today talks about Rambus' plans for demonstrating at its Tokyo developer conference this week a 32x clock multipler of 500 MHz memory channels. The channels enable 16 Gbits/s transfers and ultimately terabyte/second throughput between a microprocessor and its main memory.

IBM has shown proof points for 3D stacks that could enable a great gob of SRAM to sit on top of a multi-core microprocessor linked by fast direct-metal connections. Analysts said that could hit the market in 2010-class Power CPUs.

Other shoes are yet to fall. Sematech said this spring it planned to detail a market roadmap for 3D stacks before the end of the year. Jedec defines the standards for memory interconnects, so it has a major voice here. The good news is there is a diversity of good work on this nagging problem.

Intel's SoC mortar

2007-11-25T05:27:00.000-08:00

Hello to those of you beginning to stray back into business blogdom in anticipation of Black Monday, the day we saddle up again after the nice long Thanksgiving weekend. Hope the break was good for you. I got in some great music, but had to spend waaaay to much time dealing with car issues—alas!

I am starting off my week asking for help. Intel has got the system-on-chip religion as I noted in my last wrap up from IDF. What I don't know is what interconnects they plan to standardize on for linking silicon IP blocks. Maybe Intel itself hasn't decided.

I know Intel will choose a handful of internally and externally developed interconnects, and I know they are reaching out to third party IP block suppliers they want to work with. Got any details to share about their chosen interconnects and preferred IP partners? Email me at rbmerrit@cmp.com with your best insights before you down another turkey sandwich!

Of birds and flowers

2007-11-21T12:53:00.000-08:00

OK, it's time to take a gratitude break--and start marinating my turkey. I may be a little challenged doing the former job today because I had to just put my car in the shop and may not be able to get to the San Jose Turkey Trot tomorrow to benefit local charities…OK so I have a car to put in the shop, I already made the donation online and I can go jogging here in Campbell anytime I want, thank you.

BTW, I heard a wonderful interview with author and educator Jonathan Kozol on NPR Sunday night. Among other things he noted it is important to make social justice systemic, not just seasonal. He provides and excellent example of someone walking the talk.

I hope you have a good break, find things to be grateful for and a way to give back to your favorite cause. For anyone looking for an outlet, Intel has started a program where it will donate a buck to Boys and Girls Clubs every time someone plants a virtual sunflower in their online garden.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dialing in on phoneline

2007-11-21T12:14:00.000-08:00

I caught up with Rich Nessin, president of the Home Phoneline Networking Alliance yesterday. The interview helped round out the pictures I have been getting lately from the conferences of the Multimedia over Coax Alliance last week and the HomePlug group last month.

My take away is that everybody still has a real shot at stardom, but MoCA seems to have slightly more momentum. Verizon is deploying MoCA as fast as it can, and Comcast and Cox coming on slowly late next year.

HPNA is not out of it by any means. AT&T adds as many as 10,000 new IPTV subscribers using a week using HPNA, and five or six new telcos will jump on the bandwagon in 2008, Nessin said.

I'll believe that when I see it. What's more the group badly needs a second source of silicon now that Broadcom and Conexant have basically dropped HPNA products and are gearing up MoCA chips.

Powerline has cards to play, too. Motorola said last week it expects to get powerline into set-top boxes as soon as the IEEE 1901 standard is set, perhaps in the spring. Europe is the big driver here.

Set-top and service companies are demanding home nets support 400 Mbit-Gbit data rates over the next several years and get integrated into SoCs to drive low cost. None of the three camps have that today, but MoCA may have a slight edge getting there based on last week's conference where I heard about two chip makers saying they will deliver SoCs in 2009 or later. Stay tuned.

Can HDMI become a network?

2007-11-20T07:42:00.000-08:00

Thanks to a reader of my EE Times blog for pointing out to me some recent slides from presentations created for financial analysts by Silicon Image, the HDMI chip designer. The slides suggest a possible wrinkle in the story I overheard about Silicon Image being in stealth mode with a new concept in home networking.

There is nothing very explicit in the foils. However, a couple slides talk about a Personal Entertainment Network the company aims to get off the ground in 2008. It describes this so-called PEN as "an architecture for securely moving digital media in a home network, [enabling] any device to display to any display in the personal entertainment domain. The Personal Entertainment domain is unique to each household and includes mobile devices."

Hmmm, sounds to me like Silicon Image may be wrapping some new software, and perhaps some additional security features, around its interface chips in hopes of creating a broader service that could tempt OEMs to standardize on their products across a range of devices. The company may even take the notion directly to end users as an extension of its Simplay effort that was initially aimed at making sure HDMI devices worked through interoperability problems.

Clearly Silicon Image is riding the growth curve of TVs and related devices shifting the high def. And they are very vocal about mobile systems of all sorts from digital cameras to cellphones being their next big growth area. But can they carve out a network play from what is essentially a relatively expensive content protection interface loved by Hollywood that some operators and OEMs would rather design around via ultrawideband or 60 GHz radio links? This could be a bridge too far, especially considering the company has gone through some recent management changes. Stay tuned.

Heat's on for Moca, too

2007-11-15T19:37:00.000-08:00

The folks at the Multimedia over Coax conference were mum on their road map this week except to say that they have kicked off a MoCA 2.0 effort. Their customer base, however, was somewhat more vocal.

"The next-generation MoCA spec needs to support about 400 Mbits/s within two years and a Gbit in four years," said Mark Wegleitner, chief technology officer of Verizon Communications in a keynote speech. Verizon is installing fibre-to-the-home systems that can hit up to 400 Mbits/s today, and it can't let the current 175 Mbit/s MoCA 1.1 technology be a bottleneck for long.

Jed Johnson (right), senior director of systems engineering at Motorola which supplies set-top boxes to Verizon, echoed the call for more bandwidth. "There needs to be a gigabit path in the home," said Johnson.

What with startup Gigle Semi and the ITU g.hn standard in the works potentially delivering a Gbit/s PHY next year, MoCA has some pretty clear marching orders.

What's cookin' at MoCA Con

2007-11-14T19:42:00.000-08:00

The fall in Austin is sweet and so are all the stories rolling out of the first MoCA conference here. Comcast and Cox suggest they will roll out MoCA networking in a small way starting late next year, and chip makers agree that in the fragmented and confusing world of home networks, that's good news.

But off on the Texas horizon are a few new wrinkles. It seems everyone would like to see a single home network for all copper lines. Startup Gigle Semiconductor (Edinburgh, Scotland) hopes to offer just that sometime in 2008. Founded by execs from DS2 and STM, the company claims it will offer competitive, integrated silicon with two channels—one for powerline and the other handling any copper link (telephone lines, powerline, coax or a combo of any two) at PHY rates up to a Gbit/s. We shall see.

Over in Europe the ITU has been trying to hammer out a standard for a home net that could run on any copper media. Called g.hn, it has attracted participation from a broad group including Alcatel, Broadcom, BT, Gigle, Intel, Intellon, Panasonic, TI and Siemens. I'm looking for more details on this effort (what is the target data rate, QoS and status of the spec) if anyone can chime in with info.

One last hot tidbit: Silicon Image, the company known for its HDMI silicon, has kicked off some sort of home networking initiative of its own. I don't have any details about it but I'm hungry to learn more. Post a comment or drop me a note at rbmerrit@cmp.com

Gearing up silicon networks

2007-11-14T06:17:00.000-08:00

Kudos to IEEE Micro for a solid issue on the topic of on-chip networks. The best article for my money is the report on the December 2006 Stanford workshop on this topic.

According to the report, the gathering identified a laundry list of technical challenges. Chip networks require at least ten times too much power and have far too high a latency. For example, they scoped out a theoretical chip design in the year 2015 using 256 cores and concluded it would use 20 percent of its 150W budget just on linking the cores.

What I thought was most useful here was the research agenda the group scoped out based on its analysis. They called for new encapsulation methods and libraries in design tools because the circuits and architectures used for silicon network are not compatible with today's CAD flows. Designers also will need formal verification methods and queuing analysis tools to replace simulation which will become inadequate.

They also said we need work on new low voltage signaling technologies, 3D stacking to reduce the length of on-chip wires, on-chip photonics that can be 15-20 times faster than today's wiring and tools that more accurately model traffic on these silicon systems. It's an ambitious agenda, but without these advances engineers won't be able to create tomorrow's multicore processors.

Déjà vu for Advanced Switching

2007-11-12T11:00:00.000-08:00

Well, not exactly. Intel washed its hands of an effort to tailor PCI Express for the comms market, and they don't seem to be revisiting that decision.

However, as part of a deal selling off its IXP network processor technology to Netronome, Intel did make a point of insisting the startup adopt Intel's upcoming Quick Path Interconnect (QPI) for its next-generation IXP-based processors. QPI is Intel's answer to AMD's HyperTransport, a 6.4 Gbytes/s link replacing the Intel front-side bus in CPUs starting with the Nehalem generation in late 2008.

Don't expect QPI to try to replace tried-and-true network processor interfaces such as the SPI 4.2. It probably won't even give Interlaken, Cisco's proprietary interconnect, much of a run for its money. Nevertheless, Intel will leverage the link to try to get more design wins for x86 and IXP parts in comms.

Data centers call the cable guy

2007-11-12T07:33:00.000-08:00

Now that data centers are gearing up for 10 Gbit and faster systems, people are starting to wonder how to physically link these boxes. Standard optics are too expensive, Infiniband CX4 cables are too limited in distance (and have other issues, too) and 10GBase-T links are too power hungry.

Enter a new assortment of active optical cables including Laserwire, a 10 Gbit serial option announced today (Nov. 12) by Finisar. At as little as 500mW per port, Laserwire is much lower power than even the most optimistic 10GBase-T projections for 2008. It is rated at 10 Gbits across 35 meters and may stretch further in the future. And it doesn't have the problem of no defined standard for powering a link like the Ethernet over CX4 option.

Finisar is throwing its hat in the ring even though it is not ready to say exactly when its product ships or at what price. That's because Intel and startups Luxtera and Quellan already have rolled out three other options to solve the 10G+ cable problem. Each approach has its trade offs.

The fact that they are all jumping into the market indicates there is a clear problem with no single clear solution yet. Watch this space.

Got a beef with your cable guy? Leave a comment here or drop me a line at rbmerrit@cmp.com