Spotlight On
A spotlight on Blu Wireless
The spotlight for July and August is on Blu Wireless as CIE editor, Amy Wallington, speaks to CMO, Mark Barrett about his career in the
electronics industry and how it started through his love of music and having to build a bass guitar amplifier
model of being a fabless chip vendor to that of a System IP provider, which is better matched to working with a wider range of partners and customers to meet these market needs.
Wi-Fi seems very confusing now as it moves to 5GHz and has an array of different standards. What can you tell us about the future of Wi-Fi for the consumer?
M
ark Barrett is CMO at Blu Wireless Technology. He has been in the wireless technology industry for over 30 years and during that time has founded and played key leadership roles in several start-up organisations. He began his career with Philips Research, working on millimetre wave radar and signal processing. During the 1990s, Mark led the development of several applications of array antennas and digital beamforming to satellite, radar and mobile communications (Smart Antennas) applications. He instigated and led the TSUNAMI series of multi company European projects, which demonstrated the use of Smart Antennas for 2G and 3G mobile systems. He has also either led or been involved in the design of over a dozen mixed signal SoCs. In 2001 he founded Mansella who developed the world’s first Bluetooth cordless telephone, including the development of three complex SoCs.
32 July/August 2016
Blu Wireless has been going now for seven years and is at the driving end of developments in gigabit wireless comms systems. What have been the biggest changes that you’ve seen during your time at the company?
Back in 2009 our focus was on becoming a fabless IC supplier for the WiGig chipset market. However, during the intervening seven years, the market opportunity for millimetre wave wireless applications has grown into two additional areas – fixed wireless broadband for mobile communications infrastructure (aka Back Haul) and the use of millimetre wave for 5G communications. Our strategy, based on the use of a flexible part-programmable baseband modem to address these markets is being shown to be adaptable across this range of CE and mobile applications. Moreover, we have pivoted our business model from the original
Components in Electronics
As far as the customer is concerned, Wi- Fi connectivity will benefit from the increased download speeds offered today by 802.11ac Wi-Fi (typically up to around 250 Mbps for smartphone implementations). This will then be turbo-charged by a factor of 10 with the addition of WiGig (or 802.11ad) to over two and up to four Gbps. WiGig is a Wi- Fi standard developed to enable very high-speed-data transfers such as 4K video transfer from a server or mobile device to the TV. It’s designed to seamlessly interoperate with other Wi-Fi standards and therefore ‘Tri-Band’ Wi-Fi is initially based on solutions from vendors such as Qualcomm and Intel. To give an example of what this means, it literally reduces the download time of a 4K UHD movie from hours to minutes. It’s also incredibly power efficient, around 15 times more efficient than a typical Wi-Fi connection today. It’s a big deal and it will definitely play a major role in enabling new functionality for mobile handsets, significantly changing the way consumers will use their phones. For example, Push VoD (video on demand) is a service that allows consumers to view content whenever they want, rather than at a specified broadcast time. It uses the handset’s hard drive to push a large quantity of media over WiGig, with content chosen automatically for download based on the
same “previously-watched” algorithms used by the likes of Netflix and Amazon. With this in mind we think that wireless kiosk download services will become prolific in airports, train platforms, high streets etc. Earlier this year, Panasonic showed how a WiGig kiosk service might work -
http://news.panasonic.com/global/topics/ 2016/
44877.htm - when they demonstrated this at Narita airport in Japan. It gives a great visual insight into how WiGig will change how we consume data in the future. WiGig is set to launch as a certified standard later this year and Wi-Fi chip manufacturers will be reliant on IP developers such as ourselves to enable them to deliver WiGig chipsets. For smartphones, the innovation possibilities are huge, particularly for the likes of Apple who, with recent earnings reports showing a fall in sales for the first time in 13 years, are under pressure to deliver something very slick with the iPhone 7.
How does Blu Wireless fit into the Wi-Fi and WiGig market?
Blu Wireless licenses WiGig and related millimetre wave technology to semiconductor companies and OEMs who wish to develop chipsets and products for these emerging markets. WiGig will be essential for cable replacement, wireless display and docking for mobile devices, instant synch and back-up and simultaneous streaming of multiple, ultra-high definition and 4K. For device designers, our IP allows them to quickly and cost-effectively develop and launch industry leading wireless ICs with 60 GHz functionality. The benefits of this approach include reduced time to market, reduced development costs and reduced risk through the use of pre- certified technology and we see
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