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.