Click on title or scroll down for more information.

Monday, June 8 2009
12:00 PM - 01:15 PM
Room 205B

RPM-A:
Who Will Win the Battle for the Gigabit Wireless in your Home: WirelessHD, 802.11n, Wireless USB, or UWB?

Abstract:

The extraordinary growth in the HD multimedia market, during the last few years, has created an eminent need for truly seamless interconnectivity of the various home entertainment appliances, broadband content streaming machines and personal computing devices. According to DisplaySearch, the worldwide sales of HDTV topped US$100B for the first time in 2007 with 200M units. Meanwhile, set-top box revenue reached 41M units in 2007 according Instat. IDC projected a large leap in worldwide laptop shipments, from 108 million in 2007 to 148.2 million in 2008. Strategy Analytics estimated that 30M units of Blu-ray players will be sold in 2008, out of which 20M units are Play Stations 3 by Sony. Apple reported that since the launch of iStore, between July and September, more 100M iPhone software applications (US$40M sales) have been downloaded - an unprecedented adoption rate by any measure. The common theme that all these trends shares is a massive increase in the amount of digital content and the desire to share them seamlessly.

To cater the connectivity demand, industry heavyweights and entrepreneurial warriors are pursuing a wide range of new technologies. Among them, the so-called “Gigabit Wireless” has received a great deal of attention because it can potentially solve the “spaghetti wire” problem. While the state-of-the-art WiFi using IEEE 802.11n can already offer data rate in excess of 480Mbps, a substantial gap still remains to reach the uncompressed HD video data rate requirement - ~3 Gbps. On the other hand, it remains an open question whether a multi-node networking protocol is indeed needed, or a simpler point-to-point wireless link will suffice.

The Gigabit Wireless experts on this panel - including technology leaders, academes - will assess the market potential, examine the technology landscape, and project the deployment horizon. The competing standards such as 60-GHz WirelessHD, IEEE 802.11n, wireless USB, UWB, etc. will be addressed.

Tuesday, June 9 2009
12:00 PM - 01:15PM
Room 107B

RPTU-A:
"Will RFCMOS be Practical for 60GHz Radio and Beyond?"

Abstract:

The The 60-GHz band is a free/unlicensed band which features a large amount of bandwidth and a large worldwide overlap. The large bandwidth means that a very high volume of information can be transmitted wirelessly. The large worldwide overlap results in interoperability around the globe. Multiple applications can benefit from this--wireless HDTV, wireless laptop docking stations, extremely fast downloading of files via wireless Gigabit Ethernet, wireless USB or other protocols, wireless telecommunications backhauls, etc.

Radio frequency (RF) ICs continue to benefit from advances in CMOS process technologies. Over the years, we have seen monolithic CMOS transceiver chips handling wider bandwidths to address the needs of cellular handsets. And packing more on-chip to offer system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions for a variety of cellular and wireless bands. In reality, CMOS RF SoC chips are incorporating all the radio building blocks including the power amplifier, phase-locked loop (PLL) filter, and the antenna switch. Thus, CMOS continues to make strong inroads into the microwave territory, going well beyond 5 GHz. Now, the availability of unlicensed bands around 7 GHz and 60 GHz is motivating designers to make a giant leap and migrate deeper into this turf. These bands are intended to facilitate emerging applications like point-to-point wireless LANs, broadband Internet access, as well as automotive applications like short- (24 GHz) and longrange (77 GHz) radars for collision avoidance. Operation in these frequency bands was once the exclusive domain of III-V-compound semiconductors, such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) and indium phosphide (InP). However, aggressive scaling and corresponding improvements in CMOS and silicon germanium (SiGe) technologies is making history. What may have been considered unthinkable a decade ago is now becoming a reality. CMOS will continue its march into the microwave and millimeter wave turf slowly but steadily. And, the performance will only get better with time. However, for critical functions, it will depend on other technologies such as SiGe technology. Also, the debating never stops and a lot of people think that it could take some time for CMOS 60 GHz radios to be ready for the market. The need for multiple sources of chips and interoperability testing will stretch out the technology's time-to-market.

In this panel, we will gather the experts in the field of 60GHz radio development and discuss the status and challenges of 60GHz radio. The alternative technologies and circuit implementation trade-offs will also be debated in this panel.