For several months now, the company has had an RF/analog front end — done in a 0.18-micron silicon-germanium process — but its baseband/MAC functions have been in FPGA form. Bruce Watkins, the president and chief operating officer of Pulse~Link, said that the company has taped that out in a 0.13-micron process and should be able to sample soon.

New alternative
Pulse~Link is offering an option to the current approaches taken by the cable-based Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) and power line-based HomePlug-AV. Pulse~Link's CWave technology is medium-independent and was the first to demonstrate ultrawideband signaling over coax in 2002. Since then, it has touted its technology as a common platform for wired and wireless routing of multimedia content around the house.

The company is fresh from demos at last week's International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where it showed a wireless Xbox 360 connected to two high-definition displays — one using the component video cables shipping with the Xbox and the other using Pulse~Link's wireless ultrawideband technology. "The idea is you shouldn't be able to tell the difference, and you can't," Watkins said. "In image quality and latency, we go for wired equivalency."

If everything goes well with tests and approvals, Pulse~Link believes its Mercury chip set will start shipping in devices by late in the third quarter. But real volumes probably won't appear until mid-2007, Watkins said.

With cable operators looking to begin deployments of video-based home networks this year, chips from Entropic Communications that go into MoCA-based systems seem to have the inside track.

However, the market is still in the early stages. Parks Associates believes that only 400,000 North American homes had whole-house digital video recording solutions by the end of 2005. The market will grow to 1.7 million by the end of 2006. "What we're increasingly hearing from operators is that they want 400 Mbits," Watkins said. "If they're going to make the investment in their networks, they want something that can scale for tomorrow, and 100 Mbits of application layer is not enough."

Pulse~Link has tried to be a mediator of sorts in the stalemate over ultrawideband. In 2004, it proposed to the IEEE 802.15.3a task group a Common Signaling Mode that allows coexistence, but not compatibility, of multiple UWB physical layers. That same year, Pulse~Link joined both the Multiband-OFDM Alliance (renamed WiMedia Alliance) and the UWB Forum, which supports direct-sequence UWB. So far, its efforts to facilitate a truce haven't worked, with the MBOA rejecting its proposal.