The communications sector has been peppered with pessimism over the past few years, which makes it exciting and invigorating to experience firsthand the innovation, support and enthusiasm that has surrounded the more-recent emergence of ultrawideband (UWB) technology.

The rising tide in this wireless technology is evidenced by the fact that during the first quarter of this year alone, three UWB startups together have attracted more than $100 million in new venture-capital funding. There are a few more tangible and telltale pieces of evidence that our industry is on the rise again than to see the resumption of VC announcements and IPOs making headlines.

The forecast became sunny for UWB in February 2002 when the Federal Communications Commission allocated the largest unlicensed block of spectrum ever for consumer use. The move represented a huge vote of confidence for a technology that promises to replace wirelessly unwieldy and bothersome cables while delivering up to 480 Mbits/second of bandwidth for an ever-increasing number of Universal Serial Bus and Firewire applications that span the consumer electronics and personal computing markets.

As it takes a village to raise a child, similarly it requires the embrace and empowerment of many companies and industry organizations to deliver and deploy a successful technology. UWB is fortunate to be nurtured by a growing ecosystem including the Multiband OFDM Alliance, WiMedia Alliance, 1394 Trade Association and Wireless USB Promoters Group as well as many of the most influential players in personal computing, consumer electronics, semiconductors and mobile communications.

Even with such staunch backing, UWB has relied on a series of technical innovations to deliver on its promise. Just as ultrawideband evolved from the early single-band impulse radios to a more fully functioned version based on multiband OFDM, our next hurdle is to deliver the UWB industry's first all-CMOS radio. The advantages of CMOS already are legion in the communications world. CMOS represents UWB's best opportunity to take advantage of Moore's Law while meeting all the regulations set down by the FCC regarding low power consumption and price with high performance.

The first implementations of high-speed RF designs in mainstream digital-CMOS process technology only debuted in the mid-1990s. To date, only a select few RF design teams worldwide have been able to deliver on the promise of CMOS. Compounding the effort, no company has yet implemented a high-bit-rate, all-CMOS design.

At Staccato Communications, our belief from the start is that a technology innovation such as digital CMOS integration is the only economical way to deliver cost-effective, highly functional, interoperable UWB-enabled products. Once this innovation is realized, as with Bluetooth and 802.11 before it, ultrawideband will begin its opportunity to become just as pervasive.

G. Roberto Aiello, President and Chief Executive Officer, Staccato Communications Inc., San Diego