Multi-Band OFDM Alliance Presents Course of Action, Specification to be Released Early 2004

November 15, 2003 - In a Multi-Band OFDM Alliance (MBOA) public session on Tuesday November 11 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while the IEEE 802.15.3a standard activity continued their down-selection process, the MBOA gave a presentation to over 160 industry leaders stating that they will generate specifications based on the leading IEEE proposal, Multi-Band OFDM, as version 0.9 in February 2004 and 1.0 in May 2004.

The Multi-Band OFDM Alliance, an organization with over 38 leading global corporations, continues to show its support for the IEEE process, but in light of achieving time to market requirements as set forth by the consumer electronics industry, MBOA will be working in parallel to ensure no delays in products. The MBOA has nearly one hundred engineers from about 30 companies working within 8 technical subcommittees to define the specification, representing thousands of hours of engineering contributions. Many of the world’s leading UWB developers and majority of top 10 semiconductor companies showed their committment to build silicon based upon the MB-OFDM solution, with chipsets expected as early as 4Q 2004 and end-user product integration in 2005.

The MBOA includes some of the most influential players in the Consumer Electronics, Personal Computing, Home Entertainment, Semiconductor and Digital Imaging spaces. Collectively, these companies retain much of the world's expertise and experience in designing and building systems and silicon based upon UWB techniques. These companies have designed and built UWB systems of various types over the past 10 years, including a variety of single-band and multi-band approaches. The companies in MBOA are united in their desire to arrive at the best technical solution for UWB and to enable a dynamic market for UWB products. UWB offers the promise of ubiquitous wireless connectivity across a broad range of products, from streaming High Definition video from DVDs to TVs, to fast synchronization of data from portable devices to PCs.