60 GHz Wireless HD
October 5, 2013, IEEE Communications Society and Consumer Electronics Society, Santa Clara, CA—Jeff Gilbert from Silicon Image talked about moving more content to the bigger displays without using wires. This change simplifies installation and makes decorating the room easier.
The movement to smart phones from simple feature phones is enabling more gaming platforms and can be extended to the TV for similar experiences. Mobile games are seeing a 32 percent CAGR, mostly in apps for smart phones. There are more people, platforms, and games available, and they complement the other functions on these mobile devices and on the TVs.
The phone can also become a platform to deliver video. The video delivery needs low latency and low power silicon. By selecting different frequency bands for the transmissions, the potential results include high reliability and low interference, free spectrum, and small size.
The 60 GHz bands are good for short-range, in-room transmissions that are close to line of sight. By using a phased-array, beam-forming antenna, the short-range limits and obstacle interference are minimized. The millimeter wavelength signals can offer very high bandwidth and signal gain through coding, and the high frequency means that the antenna are very small.
The antenna needs to be a phased array structure to perform the beam forming, so the dynamic array needs to have response times very much under 1 ms. The need for the agility is due to the constantly changing environment, people absorb the RF as do other things in the environment. If you are using your phone as the controller for a game and watching it on the TV, your movements will change the RF environment adding reflectors and absorbers to the RF environment.
The technology is becoming available and reference designs are completed for mobile platforms and a single chip is available for smart phone designs. The underlying standard CMOS is optimized for video delivery and is potentially a standard for wireless HD. As an OEM product, the technology can eliminate cables.
Other markets for this EHF millimeter wavelength technology are in data transmission in WiGig, wireless backhaul, and with some changes in automotive radar at 78 GHz and as a mm wave scanner for security and medical applications. The slides from the presentation can be found on the IEEE SCV Consumer Electronics web site at : http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/ce/meetings/comsec-ces/index.html
