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Leibson's Law

Steve LeibsonLeibson's Law: It takes 10 years for any disruptive technology to become pervasive in the design community. This blog is about the disruptive technologies that either have or will win over electronic engineers, some that won't, and why. Written by Steve Leibson, Tensilica's Technology Evangelist. See my history site at www.hp9825.com. You can email me by taking the first letter of my first name, appending that to my last name, then the magic email symbol, followed by the name of the company I work for, and then a dot followed by com.

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Sunday, January 6, 2008

CES 2008: Pulse~LINK, UWB, Wireless, Coax, and Plan B

Jan 6 2008 9:08PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (8) |
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This is Sunday, Day 1 at CES 2008 and I attended a multicompany reception in Caesar’s Palace. I happened to pause (actually I was invited to pause, as these things usually go) at Pulse~LINK’s booth where the company was demonstrating its chip set sending HDMI video over coaxial cable. That stopped me because I know Pulse~LINK as a wireless UWB (ultra-wideband) company and was unfamiliar with the use of UWB over copper. The demo showed a DVD player pumping a movie to a flat-panel TV over a long, long length of spooled coax. “How did this happen?” I asked. “When and why did Pulse~LINK add conductive media to its wireless offering?”

For the answer, I spoke to John Santhoff, a founder and company CTO. “In the early part of the decade,” Santhoff said, “we were waiting for FCC approval. In fact, our next round of funding hinged on that approval and I was racking my brain, trying to think of alternative applications for UWB technology. I looked at my breadboard, connected to an antenna with a length of coax.”

That’s when the light went off in Santhoff’s head. The next step was to see if the UWB signals could jump the coax splitters normally found in standard cable-TV coaxial-cable installations. He went home to his condo that night, went around back to the entry point for the cable, inserted a splitter, and added his UWB transceiver. Then he went upstairs to his condo and looked for the signal. It was there. The UWB signal successfully jumped the splitter and Pulse~LINK was suddenly in wired and wireless UWB—at least it would be once the FCC approved wireless UWB operation, which it did. Eventually.

The moral of this story is to remind you that you need to take off your blinders and come up for air every once in a while (admittedly a mixed metaphor, but you get the idea). Force yourself to take a look around and to think about alternative approaches, alternative suppliers, and alternative applications for your product. Letting your thinking get into a rut is never a good idea. It makes you less of an engineer and it dulls your competitive edge.

Update, Jan 10: Popular Mechanics picked Pulse~LINK’s HDMI-over-coax as one of the top 20 CES innovations. The magazine did a pretty nice job of looking over the 27,000 booths at the show and finding gold. Take a moment or two to look at all 20 (Pulse~LINK’s writeup is number 20). It’ll be worth your time.


Related entries in: Cable Modem | Connected Home | Wireless | 

Reader Comments


at 1/7/2008 10:48:40 AM, Dave J said:
I'm not sure I understand why this is impressive. Does not CATV coax already carry scores of channels worth of analog and digital TV. Is it impressive that they can pump one channel of HD through it? Or is that they can do so at some frequency or manner that does not interfere with current uses? Or the distance is greater or less? Or the cable is cheaper than high-bandwidth behind-the-armoir cables, like HDMI. (HDMI cables are ridiculously expensive for reasons I don't understand, but I suspect have more to do with marketing than signal integrity.)

at 1/7/2008 9:29:55 PM, Steve Leibson said:
Dave, the point of this particular blog entry was to suggest that you need to re-evaluate your thinking every once in a while and not allow self-imposed blinders to limit your options. (Perhaps this never happens to you, so the message seems obvious.) Yes, it's great that Pulse~LINK's UWB chip can impress signals on the coax without interfering with the existing signal usage. By its very nature, UWB means that the useful signal for UWB purposes is below the noise floor for the other signal usage on the cable. However, all too frequently, someone designing a "wireless chip set" might never stop to think about a wired application. And HDMI cables are indeed ridiculously expensive, if you buy them in the wrong department at Fry's. They're quite reasonable if you pick the right ones. :-)

at 1/7/2008 9:37:38 PM, Dave J said:
Nah, it happens to me, too. ;)

at 1/8/2008 1:39:38 PM, Gary said:
HDMI cable are not that expensive if you know where to look (not at your local retailer for sure). Here is an example I found a few days ago; www dot avdgear dot com Cheers

at 1/8/2008 5:20:09 PM, Dave J said:
Of course readers of a blog like this can find them cheaply, but I'm willing to bet that the vast majority of such cables are bought at very much higher price points by less sophisticated users. That low-end manufacturers have not made significant inroads into the Big Box Electronics stores in this category is just *fascinating* to me. They are beating themselves over the head to price TVs at razor-thin margins and making their real money on hugely marked up cables. It's a glaring market failure in the middle of an otherwise highly efficient market. PS -- google on "raj nair" and "hdmi" for an interesting analysis from a bonafide analog guru of the technical requirements of HDMI.

at 1/8/2008 9:16:48 PM, Steve Leibson said:
Cable sales is a huge racket, HDMI or no. Look at the success of Monster Cables when cheap zip cord will do for almost any speakers. From the perspective of the cable vendors, the market has cetainly not failed. Quite the opposite. It's working great for them. It's also working great for the Big Box stores. Why would they want to sell $10 cables with $1 profit when they can easily use the same shelf space to sell $50 or $100 cables at ten times the profit? Answer: They would not.

at 1/9/2008 3:51:42 PM, Dave J said:
I've been spending too much time with economists and it's starting to effect the way I talk. I meant "market failure" in the sense that the allocation of goods and services is not efficient, in this case due primarily to "asymmetrical information" between the seller and buyer. In a healthy, competitive market, the cable makers would indeed be forced to sell at a lower price because consumers would see through the oxygen-free triple-core braided BS. This, of course, would drive some of those cable makers out of the business, where one presumes they would eventually find a more productive use for their skills. Society would be better off overall. It's an unfortunate quirk of language that businessmen and economists use the word "market" in practically opposite ways. To the businessman, if he's making high returns with little or no risk, he thinks "hey, this market is great!" whereas an economist who sees the same market might say "there is something wrong with this market." What makes the cable story interesting (to me) is that this "racket" persists over many years. One would think that this good money would attract more competition, which in turn would eventually drive down prices. Also, one would think that the secret would eventually leak out for example, that Monster Cable speaker wire does not sound better than a spool of appropriate gauge zip cord.

at 1/9/2008 6:32:40 PM, Steve Leibson said:
Dave, I was not at all confused by your use of the phrase "market failure." I'm quite aware of the Libertarian economist view of frictionless markets and I wish that more markets were indeed as smooth and efficient as some economists might like to believe. They're not. The market for overpriced CE cables is one of myriad examples where the market is not well informed. Certain items sold on eBay is another one (where sellers can sell the same item for different prices depending on the day and the time of day). The consumption of news is yet another, where the carefully dissected exploits of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, and the dating habits of French President Nicholas Sarcozy (just to take today's headlines) are delivered and consumed with more relish than the latest news from, for example, the war in Iraq. It's no use pretending that markets will someday become optimally efficient because I don't see robots replacing humans in the nesr future, nor would I want that to happen. The Internet helps reduce market friction in many wonderful ways, but I don't think it will make friction completely disappear simply because of human foibles.

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