Manhasset, N.Y. - The mirage of accord on the path toward an IEEE standard for high-rate data communications based on ultrawideband technology was abandoned in the deserts of New Mexico last week. In the wake of rancorous debate between the Multiband-OFDM Alliance and the opposing DS-CDMA group, the two sides left Albuquerque deadlocked, raising the specter of two de facto UWB standards emerging.

While all concerned parties expressed dissatisfaction with such an outcome, neither side showed a willingness to compromise in a debate that, because of the disparate nature of the two proposals, is essentially an either/or situation. The technical discord was mirrored on the business side, as the air filled with breach-of-contract accusations, lingering licensing questions and the unholy threat of lawsuits. With a multibillion-dollar market at stake, neither group wants to be left holding a nonstandard implementation, making a deadlock appealing for both.

While the Multiband-OFDM Alliance (MBOA) plan emerged from last week's meeting as the sole proposal officially before the IEEE, it failed to win confirmation as the basis for a standard. The MBOA is led by Intel and Texas Instruments, and the DS-CDMA group by XtremeSpectrum and Motorola.

The market is primed to ship UWB-enabled devices at a rate of 1.46 million in 2004, rising to 45 million in 2007, a compound annual growth rate of 214 percent, according to research firm Allied Business Intelligence (Oyster Bay, N.Y.). But for many observers, even that growth rate understates the potential.

"We're talking about hundreds of millions of UWB devices here," said Craig Mathias, principal at Farpoint Group (Ashland, Mass.). "People have talked about [UWB for] cable replacement, audio/video distribution, PCs and other applications, but no one's even mentioned toys or gaming-this is a gigantic market."

The high stakes may explain why each IEEE 802.15.3a task group meeting is preceded by activity designed to enhance relative positions. Last week's confab was no exception. Two weeks prior, XtremeSpectrum Inc. announced it would be offering-free of charge-any and all intellectual property related to its direct-sequence code-division, multiple-access (DS-CDMA) UWB implementation, should the .3a task group select that design. This was followed by news that Motorola Inc.-one of the original backers of XSI's proposal-was buying the Vienna, Va., company for an undisclosed sum.

Analyst Mathias said both actions were an eleventh-hour attempt by XtremeSpectrum to save itself from going under. "XSI doesn't have any value and the RAND-Z [reasonable and nondiscriminatory-zero licensing] was a last-ditch effort to get the task group to go with [its proposal]."

The meeting in Albuquerque was preceded by a stab at cooperation, in the form of joint work by Intel (representing the MBOA) and XSI/Motorola to examine and compare the interference levels of their respective technologies in side-by-side tests. But that spirit cratered on the opening day of discussions, when Motorola and XSI went public with information that Intel said was under nondisclosure.

"We worked with Intel behind the scenes to get closure, and the core of our message was interference," said Omid Tahernia, vice president and director of strategy and business development at the wireless- and mobile-systems group within Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector. "We were simply trying to share the info with the forum."

According to sources present at the meeting, the situation quickly deteriorated, with Intel threatening to sue for breach of contract. Even industry vet Bob Heile, chair of the .3a task group and effectively the umpire between the two sides, appeared to grow rattled. Sources said that Heile revoked XSI president John McCorkle's voting privileges, only to later apologize and reinstate them.

According to Chris Fisher, XSI's vice president of marketing, the fracas erupted around the disclosure that the MBOA proposal, a frequency-hopping scheme that involves three hops, resulted in interference levels 4.8 dB higher than the DS-CDMA proposal. "As the number of hops increased, the back-off rose rapidly to 8 dB at seven hops and 10 dB at 13 [hops]," Fisher said. The figures, he said, referred to the amount by which the MBOA proposal's power output would have to be reduced to cut the interference to the same level as that of DS-CDMA.

However, Ben Manny, director of the radio communications lab for Intel Corp.'s R&D operation, termed the test results inconclusive. "One of the instruments gave a higher reading than the other and we don't know why yet," he said. "Even if the higher one was more accurate, we still don't know if that's an issue. Those are the answers we wanted to get before going with a complete public disclosure on this."

Sources who were at the meeting confirmed on Thursday that the MBOA-which had won on the task force's down-selection process earlier in the week but failed to gain a 75 percent majority in the confirmation vote-managed to escape Albuquerque without a second confirmation vote. According to DS-CDMA backers, the MBOA group called for an early adjournment on Wednesday and removed the topic from the agenda of a last-minute meeting Heile called on Thursday morning in an effort to reach a conclusion.

Had that second confirmation vote taken place, the DS-CDMA camp believes, the MBOA would have lost, putting both proposals back on the table. The next opportunity for confirmation is in January.

XSI's Fisher maintained that the MBOA "knows they're in trouble, and that's why we're confident that we'll get the votes we need to be confirmed" by the time of a subsequent .3a task force meeting in March. "We're already gathering more [votes] because of this demonstration" in Albuquerque, he said.

Besides interference, other outstanding issues relate to the licensing of intellectual property. "We've said all along that we intend to fairly license our IP," said Intel's Manny, "but with so many large companies involved, it's difficult to get it finalized. It's going through the final legalities right now." Pointing to XSI's offer of a RAND-Z, Manny questioned Motorola's stance on the subject now that it has bought XSI out, particularly with respect to any IP Motorola may have added to the DS-CDMA proposal.

Tahernia said Motorola will honor the XSI RAND-Z, but he would not comment on Motorola's own patent and IP stance until after the semiconductor group's pending spin-off from parent Motorola Inc.

Two de facto standards?

Now locked in pitched battle in the runup to the Consumer Electronics Show in January, both sides in the UWB standoff have said they will continue development down their own respective paths. Both have recently discounted the possibility of a dual-physical-layer standard.

Motorola has product in hand and will continue to cater to customers' needs, said Tahernia, referring to the Trinity chip set that XtremeSpectrum announced last year. That first-generation product reached 100 Mbits/second, he said, "and we're now sampling our second generation at 114 Mbits/s." He described "a path to a 500-Mbit/s fourth-generation product by the 2005 time frame."

In between, he said, the company will implement a third generation, also at 114 Mbits/s, that will signify higher integration and lower power as a result of a move from the current 0.18-micron process to the 90-nanometer C90 CMOS process that Motorola is co-developing with STMicroelectronics and Philips Semiconductors in Crolles, France. The third-generation device will integrate the baseband and media-access control, said Tahernia, and will appear sometime in the third quarter of 2004.

Last week, the MBOA unveiled its own time lines. At a late-evening presentation in Albuquerque, the group declared that Version 0.9 would be finished by February and the final Version 1.0 by May. Sample silicon will land by the fourth quarter of next year, said Kursat Kimyacioglu, director of wireless business development, connectivity, at Philips Semiconductors. He foresees integrated modules by the first quarter of 2005 and multiband-OFDM-based products by the second.

While such a split is problematic, Martin Reynolds, an analyst who examines future technologies for Gartner Dataquest Inc., took a philosophical view. "To me, this isn't all that important, since UWB is a 2006-2007 market," he said. "It's a mess right now, but by 2008 it'll all be resolved."

Neither he nor Farpoint Group's Mathias sees a "winner take all" situation. "XSI and Motorola have time before the MBOA brings out product," said Mathias. "Even if they get pushed aside, there's still lots of vertical markets Motorola can get into."

"Intel has a lot of weight behind it, and that works in its favor," said Reynolds. But he emphasized that the challenge with UWB lies in signal-processing and chip-making skills, which Motorola possesses.