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	TABLE OF CONTENTS Home WiNet Is WiMedia ready?

Is WiMedia ready for the mobile phone? Is the mobile phone ready for WiMedia?
As a cable replacement for USB, WiMedia is ready for deployment in mobile phones. Many phones support USB for synching files with PCs. In this situation power management is fairly easy in that the WiMedia radio need not be turned on until the customer indicates that he or she wants to synchronize files.

Connecting between a PC and a mobile phone is well understood, and Certified Wireless USB adds encryption so that the wireless link is as secure as a cable. Both the phone and PC have rich enough user interfaces that this operation should be easy to understand and straight forward.

In order to fit in a mobile phone, WiMedia chip packaging must be smaller and more power efficient than current packaging used to build PC peripherals such as wireless USB hubs and printers. At Staccato Communications, we are building a single chip CMOS WiMedia implementation that is significantly smaller and more power efficient than competing multi-chip solutions.

Certified Wireless USB and the packaging necessary to fit in a phone are fairly straightforward compared to the obvious question of "What comes next after Certified Wireless USB?"

This is the problem that has vexed Bluetooth. There are dozens of interesting applications for Bluetooth, but only Bluetooth communications headsets have sold in the volumes necessary to be considered significant in the mobile phone market. After PC to mobile phone file synching over Certified Wireless USB, What is the killer application?

Adoption of WiMedia into mobile phones is expected to be modest initially, but market analysts are predicting WiMedia will be adopted on a large scale for digital still cameras. The combination of high speed transfer and low power consumption using the familiar USB model makes WiMedia a natural for digital still cameras, and this is expected to evolve into the video camera market. Analysts are predicting this market based on camera to PC file transfer, but they haven't given much consideration to camera to mobile phone file transfer.

The infrastructure to support digital photography is already built into Mobile Phones. Recently New York City announced that they would accept digital images for 911 calls and 311 calls for city services. Consumers will demand that their phones and cameras share pictures.

The next step is to display these pictures somewhere. Mobile phones are increasing in storage capacity and processing power, but screens aren't getting any larger. WiMedia can enable use of suitably equipped TV sets and PCs to allow mobile phones to exploit these larger display surfaces.

Whether the protocols to do this will be Bluetooth 3.0, Certified Wireless USB or WiNet is still to be determined, but whatever protocols and software stacks are chosen, they will run on WiMedia hardware.

The whole is greater than the sum of the parts
The key to the WiMedia form of ultrawideband is that it can leverage existing markets surrounding USB, Bluetooth and internet protocols. WiMedia radios can support one or all of these schemes simultaneously. With mass market, power-efficient and low cost single chip implementation, WiMedia can greatly extend the utility of mobile phones.

About the author
Billy Brackenridge is a product system architect at Staccato Communications, where he helps customers build innovative products using Staccato's Ripcord family of products, a single-chip, all-CMOS solution based on Certified Wireless USB. Earlier in his career, Billy helped pioneer multimedia at the Voyager Company in Santa Monica developing CD-ROM and laser disc interactive titles, and then worked as a program manager in the operating systems group at Microsoft where he worked on USB, audio and Bluetooth. He can be contacted at billyb@staccatocommunications.com.

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