Archive for April, 2009

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Picongen vs Competition

Friday, April 17th, 2009

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There have been many announcements over the past four years, with many industry forums such as WiMedia, WirelessHD and recently WHDI.

WiMedia promotes Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology that does not provide enough bandwidth (less than 500 MBps) while the HDMI signals can range from 1.5 Gbps to about 3 Gbps. Recent failures of companies like Tzero, a strong proponent of WiMedia, further goes to show that there is very little acceptance of UWB for wireless HDMI solution.

WirelessHD promotes 60 GHz technology which provides the bandwidth but not the range. However, 60 GHz technology is also limited by line-of-sight (where transmitter and receiver should been aligned in a straight line) and the signals wont pass through walls. This makes it a single room short range solution. In addition, its signals require an order of magnitude high power (8 watts) compared to regular cell phones (0.2 watts) which raises very serious concerns for its suitability for home use. These drawbacks coupled with the facts that the technology is widely un-proliferated and that the underlying physical layer is not governed by any standards raises issues of interoperability, cost and adoption.

WHDI stands for Wireless Home Digital Interface which promotes a new physical layer based on Joint Source Channel Coding (or JSCC). It uses a mechanism of distributed errors unevenly over different bits to be transmitted. This results in the truncation of information in the transmission since the errors are not retransmitted in this system. To understand the truncation mechanism better, consider the following:

A typical digital video signal, including a HDMI video signal, consists of frames and each frame is further divided into pixels. In a digital video signal, each pixel is represented by a binary number with multiple digits. So, typically a pixel can be of 8 bit, 10 bit, 12 bit resolution. The more the number of bits, the higher the resolution. HDMI pixels are represented using high number of bits and transmitted at a much higher data rate. In this example, let’s take a HDMI signal whose pixels are represented using 30 bits. Now, with WHDI’s truncation mechanism, the bits 15 thru 29, which contain more information about the pixels (Most Significant Bits (MSBs)), are given higher priority of transmission than the lower order bits (Least Significant Bits (LSBs)). This is done to minimize the incidence of errors for the higher order bits in the wireless transmission. Doing so will, of course, guarantee that bits 15 thru 29 have higher priority in transmission but at the expense of bits 0 thru 14 (the lower order bits).

The argument then is that since bits 0 thru 14 contain less amount of information, losing those bits will not make a significant difference in the perception of the video quality. That is not true and in some cases, using this truncation scheme is even worse than using compression. What effectively happens with the method of transmission being proposed by WHDI is the truncation of information. This truncation mechanism of WHDI effectively turned a 30 bit HDMI pixel into a 15 bit VGA pixel. So, although the signal going into the processing engine is an uncompressed signal, the outcome is a truncated signal. In a dynamic RF environment, at different range and penetration (signals thru walls), this method raises some serious quality issues and makes it a compromised solution and has some of the same drawbacks as the 60 GHz technology in terms of cost, interoperability and adoption.

Multi-Streaming technology is developed by Picongen and is based on commercially available standard cost-reduced WiFi chips. It uses multiple WiFi channels at 5 GHz and has the same excellent range and penetration as standard WiFi. It provides up to 3.9 Gbps of wireless bandwidth with no changes to the existing WiFi physical layer. The innovative Multi-Streaming technology is a complete layer-3 digital software solution which transparently transmits the HDMI signals without compressing or truncating the HDMI pixels.

This makes Picongen’s solution a truly multiple room, full resolution wireless HDMI solution.

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Picongen Continues to Build Strong Patent Portfolio

Friday, April 17th, 2009

With a series of patents published around the core technology and more in the pipeline, Picongen continues to strengthen its intellectual property portfolio. “The core technology patents are now published with many more system level patents yet to be published.” said Sai Manapragada, CTO of Picongen. Here’s the abstract of the latest patent:

“Methods and systems for a novel multi-media macro-network. A Picon media server is connected with variety of high data rate sources including high definition video and audio connections. Picon media server is configured to process the variety of data streams into lower data rate IP packets and dynamically transmit them wirelessly via plurality of channels and antennas to variety of Picon receivers which are configured to congregate the received data packets into the correct signal formats for specific displays.” USPTO, PatPub#20090100495.

The Wireless Digital Home concept has been making rounds in the industry for over four years now. The problem is a tricky one in that it requires very high wireless bandwidth while at the same time requiring the wireless signals to pass through walls for a truly multiple room solution. In addition, the cost of such a system has to be low for it to be viable in the consumer space and it should be safe to be used in everyday life.

Picongen is the only company that can make the wireless digital home dream a reality with its patented Multi-Streaming technology.

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Picongen Products Available by CES 2010

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

Picongen announced that it will make its Wireless HDMI transmit and receive adapters available by the fourth quarter of this year. The first products will be made using commercially available off-the-shelf hardware with Picongen’s Multi-Streaming engine. “These products will be used to master the interfaces between Picongen’s products and the consumer devices,” said Sai Manapragada, CTO of Picongen Wireless. The next generation products are believed to have smaller form-factor. Picongen wants to have its products eventually integrated into HDTVs, set-top boxes, HDDVDs, etc.,

Picongen’s Multi-Streaming products provide wireless uncompressed and encrypted HDMI. Picongen’s products will come out ahead since they are based on a proven WiFi physical layer. Mr. Manapragada also stated that “Picongen’s TX and RX adapters will first be used with existing legacy HDMI devices such as HDDVDs, set-top boxes, HDTVs, etc., before being integrated into new devices…” Picongen’s transmitter adapter and receiver adapter will be available by the end of this year, to be launched at the CES 2010 show.” noted Dale Kluesing, CEO of Picongen Wireless.

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Where is Wireless HDMI?

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

State of the Technology

State of existing technologies such as Ultra Wide Band (UWB) and current implementations of WiFi (even with 802.11n) do not have sufficient bandwidth for wireless streaming of uncompressed HDMI video which requires about 1.5 Gbps of bandwidth. UWB at 3.1/10 GHz provides a maximum of 480 Mbps at a very short range and despite valiant efforts by companies like T-zero (a company that is now shut-down) has not been able to provide a viable wireless HDMI solution. The 60 GHz technology (Sibeam) provides a maximum bandwidth of about 4 Gbps and that at a short range. Also, the 60 GHz technology requires very high power (in the order of 8 W, compare this about 200 mW emitted by a regular cell phone) and suffers from severe line-of-sight issues making it suited only as a single room solution since the signals cannot penetrate through the walls.

WiFi, on the other hand, provides a maximum of 300 Mbps in a 20 MHz channel (with a 4×4 spatial MIMO configuration) at longer ranges and its signals at 5 GHz can pass through walls, making it well suited for a multi-room solution. However, existing implementations of WiFi do not provide enough bandwidth to stream true HDMI video streams (1.5 Gbps). While there are many companies that provide compressed HD video over WiFi, the market is yet to see a product that provides wireless uncompressed HDMI.

Amimon, a chipset company that uses a new physical layer technology called the Joint Source-Channel Coding or JSCC, started a new industry forum called the Wireless Home Digital Interface or WHDI forum and uses a novel scheme of transmitting the bits. Although, the scheme does not apply compression to the transmitted bits in the traditional sense, its method can cause the certain information to the lost due to errors in transmission. This will cause the information received by the receiver to be truncated which affects the resolution. So, in essence, Amimon does not provide “uncompressed HDMI”.

As we are aware, any kind of compression, including the Amimon’s technique, requires that the data be unencrypted. However, the HDMI video streams are encrypted which means that any compression scheme including that of Amimon will not work on encrypted video and pure data streams.

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Picongen’s Wireless Multi-Streaming: A Pervasive Technology

Sunday, April 12th, 2009

Speaking about Picongen’s Multi-Streaming technology, Dale Kluesing, CEO of Picongen Wireless said “Picongen’s technology essentially operates above the physical layer which makes it a complimentary technology that can be used with any physical layer technology such as WiFi, CDMA, WiMAX and even Amimon’s JSCC.”, “…it efficiently uses the existing available WiFi spectrum to provide very high bandwidth (about 3.9 Gbps) with all of the advantages of WiFi” he added.

Picongen’s Technology Differentiation:

1. High wireless bandwidth (up to 3.9 Gbps) using standard WiFi

2. Works with all classes of information including video, audio and data

3. Provides longer ranges to enable multi-room solutions

4. No new modulation, so no need to re-work or develop a new physical layer

5. No compression, so no loss of quality

This enables high data rate applications such as uncompressed and encrypted HDMI video (which is typically 1.5 Gbps). Picongen offers a pure digital layer-3 solution (purely software) that works with existing MAC and PHY layers of 802.11a/b/g/n. The quantum improvement in home wireless distribution of information is based on Picongen’s patented Multi-Streaming technology.

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Multi-Streaming for Wireless HDMI: Part-3 Multi-Streaming Defined

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

WiFi Channel Layering

Let’s for instance take a single AP using channel 6 to cater to say 11 users each requiring 1 Mbps. If more users are to be supported, say 22, then each user is limited to about 500 Kbps. However, if another AP is used at channel 11, then all 22 users can enjoy 1 Mbps of bandwidth. in this case, the first 11 users will be serviced by the first AP at channel 6 and the next 11 users will be served by the second AP at channel 11. In any case, the maximum data rate available for any single users is not more than 11 Mbps assuming, that user is the only one using the network. The use of multiple APs to increase the user support within one location of the network is called Channel Layering.

WiFi Channel Bonding

A concept called channel-bonding enables using multiple adjacent channels (like 1, 6 and 11), or two 20 MHz channels at 5 GHz spectrum to 40 MHz, thereby increasing the spectrum used which then increases the bandwidth. The method of combining multiple adjacent channels to form a bigger contiguous channel is called Channel Bonding.

WiFi Multi-Streaming (Picongen)

Since the 802.11a/n client and AP use only one of the 12 available channels, there are 11 unused channels in the unlicensed spectrum that can be used for additional transmissions. What if a user needs say 1.5 Gbps like in the case of uncompressed HDMI? Using concept like Channel Bonding will limit the total bandwidth to 80 MHz within one UNII band, whereas using Channel Layering will limit the maximum bandwidth for a user to the channel maximum of 300 Mbps.

This is where Picongen’s Multi-Streaming technology comes into play. A single input data stream with a data rate of 1.5 Gbps is dispersed into several multiple data streams and multiple transmitters are employed at various frequency channels to simultaneously transmit the multiple data streamsto the receiver which simultaneously receives multiple data streams and combines the multiple data streams into a single higher data rate stream. This method of dispersion of a higher data rate stream into multiple lower data streams and simultaneously transmitting of multiple lower data rate streams; and later simultaneous receiving of multiple lower data rate streams and combining of multiple lower data rate streams into a single higher data rate stream is called Multi-Streaming.

Traditionally, whenever higher bandwidth is required, two approaches are generally used. One method is to find more adjacent spectrum to aggregate into a contiguously larger spectrum, And another method when the available contiguous spectrum is limited, is to employ a higher rate of modulation such as QPSK, 16-QAM, 64-QAM, depending on the tolerable error of the system to realize higher bandwidths. Picongen proposes a third method to enhance the bandwidth between two end systems by the use of disparate non-contiguous channels with its patented Multi-Streaming technology.

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Multi-Streaming for Wireless HDMI: Part-2 Available WiFi Bandwidth

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

WiFi has two specturm flavors: 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz.

WiFi 802.11b/g (2.4 GHz)

There is 30 MHz of unlicensed spectrum (spectrum for which a device maker doesn’t have to buy a license from the government). The 30 Mhz is divided into 14 over-lapping channels, of which channels 1, 6, and 11 are non-overlapping channels. 802.11b and 802.11g both operate at the 2.4 GHz spectrum much like most household devices such as cordless cell-phones and microwave ovens. At any given moment a client like your laptop will connect to the Access Point (AP) using one of the 14 channels (typical default channel number is 6 or 11). The difference between 11b and 11g is also the modulation used on the physical layer which makes the difference in the data rates (also referred to as bandwidth). 11b uses DSSS for a peak data rate of 11 Mbps and 11g uses OFDM for a peak data rate of 54 Mbps.

2.4 G Hz Spectrum: In North America, the 802.11b spectrum ranges from 2400MHz to 2483MHz, and is divided up into 11 channels from 2412MHz to 2462MHz, spaced 5MHz apart. However, each channel is 22MHz wide, so there is great overlap. Channel 1, for instance, is centered at 2412MHz, but extends out from 2401MHz to 2433MHz. Channel 6 is centered at 2437MHz, extending from 2426MHz to 2448MHz.

WiFi 802.11a (5 GHz)

Within 5 GHz again, it has 3 bands UNII-I, UNII-II and UNII-III bands each with 80 MHz of spectrum divided into 4 channels of 20 MHz each. At any given time, an 802.11a client like that in a laptop connect to the 802.11a supporting AP using one of these 12 channels at 5 GHz.

5 GHz Spectrum: The corresponding operating frequencies in the U.S. fall into the national information structure (U-NII) bands: 5.15-5.25GHz, 5.25-5.35GHz, and 5.725-5.825GHz. Within this spectrum, there are twelve, 20MHz channels, and each band has different output power limits. The following identifies the center frequency and maximum output power of each of the U-NII bands:

wifi-5-ghz-spectrum1

WiFi 802.11n (MIMO)

With the advent of 802.11n proposing Multiple-In-Multiple-Out (MIMO), the data rates can further be increased by employing multiple output spatial streams for multiple input streams. and 4 x 4 spatial stream, for instance can increase the data rate effectively by 4 times and further adjustment of other WiFi MAC and PHY parameters can get additional bandwidth, 300 Mbps using a 20 MHz spectrum with OFDM. If both the client and the AP support 802.11n, then depending on the spatial streams supported, the effective bandwidth between the two can be up to 300 Mbps (for a 4 x 4 spatial streams MIMO).

wifi-5-ghz-mimo-rates2

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Multi-Streaming for Wireless HDMI: Part-1 State of the Art

Thursday, April 9th, 2009

Current State of Wireless HDMI

So what is this wireless HDMI? And why is it so difficult that there are no solutions out in the market even with people working on it for over 4 years? And this after major companies have already declared that they want this… like yesterday. Every CES, we see the same song and dance about how close we are to a wireless HDMI solution.

Meanwhile, other half-baked solutions are promoted with compression schemes with UWB and WiFi based devices. The point of the matter is that the HDMI streams are about 1.5 Gbps to about 3 Gbps while the available wireless bandwidth with UWB is about 470 Mbps. I cant but count the number of press releases I saw on T-zero and Gifen and Analog Devices announcing product after product year after year only to find out that it’s not what we want. And after the sorry demise of T-zero, the final nail in UWB’s coffin is all but awaiting the thud by the hammer. That leaves the 60 GHz technology. With its limited range and severely line of site, not to mention the whopping 8 watts of power requirement on the transmitter (do you really want a 8 W transmitter in your home?), is no where near fulfilling the dream of tru full resolution uncompressed wireless HDMI with HDCP.

Its laughable now to even think about the big claims made by LG back in CES 2008. They had a grand display showing compressed signal transmission over 802.11g (not even 11n) and without MIMO at that. Phillips promised a working display but that was a closed demo. We later found out that there wasn’t a product to show for. Then we had Sony’s empty display with Amimon’s name tagged around but no real product to show.

And then there was Panasonic with its solution based on Sibeam technology. The demo was arranged on a pedastal to prevent people from walking between the source transmitter (size of a mini-fridge) and the HDTV. When one of the presenter accidentally walked between the source and the transmitter, the signal was lost. It took about 10 seconds for the system to regain its composure and start displaying the video again. Even if they can get this thing to work at 60 GHz, its going to be a single room solution. And what about the 8 W transmitter? Well! You be the judge.

Technology Comparision

Comparing apples to apples now, Sibeam does provide about 4 Gbps of bandwidth which is more than sufficient to handle uncompressed HDMI streams as against UWB’s 470 Mbps and 802.11a WiFi’s 300 Mbps (802.11n 4 spatial streams MIMO). On the other hand, UWB and WiFi, owing to their operation in the 3.1 GHz/10 GHz and 5 GHz spectrum respectively, enjoy better ranges and are not limited by the line-of-sight issues like the 60 GHz technology. Also, their transmit powers are well under 1 Watt as against the 8 Watts required for the 60 GHz technology. Also, WiFi is based on standards and is far more advanced, well-proven and much more proliferated than UWB or 60 GHz technology, which are largely un-proven in terms of products’ inter-operability since they are non-standard.

Picongen’s Multi-Streaming

Now, wouldn’t it be nice to see a technology that can give us 4 Gbps of bandwidth at low powers and with the same range and penetration as WiFi? Picongen’s Multi-Streaming technology does exactly that. It provides up to 3.9 Gbps of bandwidth using the standard WiFi MAC and PHY layers, thereby having the same range and penetration as standard WiFi. It is an enormous advantage to leverage existing physical layer technology like WiFi since it is already widely proliferated - which reduces risk, and since it has mastered the device manfacturing processes over numerous generations of products - which reduces cost.

Picongen’s Multi-Streaming technology can easily be implemented using embedded software that can easily be integrated into existing and new consumer devices like HDTVs, HDDVDs, Blu-Rays, Xboxes, and set-top boxes.

We haven’t discussed Amimon here by design. We will discuss the Joint-Source-Channel-Coding (a brand-new physical layer) and its truncation mechanisms ( a form of compression) in the next blog when we discuss compression, HDCP, DRM and available bandwidths in the unlicensed spectrum. (…To be Continued…)

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Picongen launches Multi-Streaming technology for Wireless uncompressed HDMI

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

Picongen is an embedded software company that built a quantum-leap technology called Multi-Streaming to enable true wireless uncompressed HDMI. This self-funded start-up has now come out of the stealth mode.

In the recent meeting the Board of Directors along with the participating members of the Board of Advisors have unanimously voted to get Picongen out of the stealth mode owing to the publishing of the core technology patents in March 2009.

Picongen’s Multi-Streaming is an innovative wireless bandwidth expansion technology that enables wireless streaming of full resolution uncompressed HDMI with HDCP without using any kind of compression and without a need for a new physical layer. It’s technology works at 5 GHz spectrum with standard WiFi physical layers and thus provides the range and penetration needed for a multi-room long range wireless HDMI solution.

“Picongen solves the problem by providing more bandwidth rather than attempting to compress signals like other companies.”, said Sai Manapragada, CTO of Picongen Wireless. The only other company that promises full resolution wireless HDMI is Amimon which uses a sophisticated compression scheme. “… although Amimon says it does not compress, the inherent scheme of concentrating errors for the lower bits results in truncation which is worse than compression in some cases. Also, the truncated JSCC scheme will not work for data where each bit transmitted needs to be accounted for at the receiver.” he added.

Another company in this space is Sibeam that uses the 60 GHz technology. Dale Kluesing, CEO of Picongen Wireless said “Picongen’s solution provides the range needed for a complete home solution up to 300 feet, whereas 60 GHz does not provide that kind of range nor does it fare well through walls since it is severely limited by line-of-sight.” Speaking about the cost of implementation Dale said “Picongen’s solution is easily intergated into HDTVs and set-top boxes as against Amimon or Sibeam since it uses off-the-shelf WiFi chips with its patented embedded software. Not requiring s new physical layer is the biggest advantage Picongen has over its competitors.” he added.

Picongen secured a number of patents and has begun its product development phase. Its strong patent portfolio consists of both US national and international around its technology and products. Picongen hopes to ship its first generation products before the end of this year to be ready for an international launch by CES 2010.