Spark Gaps and Ultra Wide Band Data Transmission

Embedded Geek writes: "It sounds like the revenge of Marconi, but Scientific American has a story about the use of spark gap technology for Ultra Wide Band (UWB) data transmission to send data at 100 to 500 Mbps across short distances (five to ten meters). As with every new technology, 'engineers expect these UWB units to be cheaper, smaller and less power-hungry than today's narrowband radio devices,' but there might be some truth to the hype. The secret appears to be the lack of a carrier wave, allowing use of wide swaths of the spectrum for transmission (the few comments I read at the FCC site referenced in the article addressed spectrum allocation)." Read below for a few more links, too.

"The article pitches the technology as a challenger or succesor to Bluetooth and 802.11a. There are several commercial companies investigating the technology (Aetherwire, Multispectral, and others are cited in the article) and Intel has a paper cited in the article. Spin off applications from the components needed to make this technology work might include a GPS style system accurate to one meter and a radar technology that would allow seeing through walls for construction, rescue, and (ahem) law enforcement."

Comments

Think of it as Bluetooth on Crack

[JohnDenver]

100-500 Mbits/sec can pretty much serve as a wireless bus for most of your components. With that kind of speed, you could physically seperate your (CPU+Memory) (Harddrive) (Monitor)

Not to mention all of the wireless possibilities linking to Home Entertainment system, Car, Access Control Devices, Etc.

Given Intel's goals to make UWB cheap as they're trying to fabricate it on CMOS it would be everywhere where wires used to be.

MY ERROR 1/3000 of a cell phone Hair Dryer

[JohnDenver]

1/3000 of a cell phone.

Ultrawideband communications systems would share the same problem except that they deliberately operate at power levels so low that they emit less average radio energy than hair dryers, electric drills, laptop computers and other common appliances that radiate electromagnetic energy as a by-product. This low-power output means that UWB's range is sharply restricted--to distances of 100 meters or less and usually as little as 10 meters. For well-chosen modulation schemes, interference from UWB transmitters is generally benign because the energy levels of the pulses are simply too low to cause problems.

A typical 200-microwatt UWB transmitter, for example, radiates only one three-thousandth of the average energy emitted by a conventional 600-milliwatt cell phone.