WTRS Executive Interview
Interview with Noam Geri, VP Marketing & Business Development, and Co-Founder of Amimon.
August 27, 2007
George:
Can you tell us a little
bit about your background and how you came to join Amimon?
Noam:
Sure. First of all, I am one of the founders of Amimon. My personal background
before that was mainly in Israel. My engineering career started in the Israel
Defense Forces, like a lot of other engineers in this realm. I started off in
one the elite R&D units in the Israeli military and then joined an Israeli
startup called 'Libit" that did semiconductor components for cable modems.
Libit was acquired in '99 by Texas Instruments and I continued, through
the acquisition, as a Texas Instruments employee until 2003. What brought me to
California was actually doing an MBA at Stanford. While I was in Texas
Instruments, my responsibility was business development and strategic marketing
for new broadband technologies. So I was involved in various standards
activities that were both broadband standards and home networking standards that
tied into broadband. That brought me into the standards and home networking
arena. After leaving Texas
Instruments,
I joined two others to found Amimon. One of the other founders, Zvi Reznic,
worked with me at Libit, and he is a modem expert. My background as an engineer
is also one of a modem designer. And Meir Feder, our CTO, is the third
co-founder, and brings the video angle. He is a professor in information theory
and an expert in video compression and Information Theory in general. The
combination of the founders really represents very well what Amimon is doing,
which is our wireless video modem technology.
George:
What can you tell us about Amimon the company, itself, and particularly about
the Wireless HDI technology?
Noam:
When we founded Amimon, it was really at a very 'hot' time for wireless
networking. In 2003, 2004, UWB was at its most exciting stage. 802.11n was
really bound for glory; it was only the beginning, but clearly there was a lot
of excitement. And of course 802.11g
was already known and considered a huge success. So the wireless data world
really created a lot of appetite for other wireless applications and wireless
video was the natural direction. Wireless video demos have been around almost
since there was wireless and video. As soon as there was video and wireless,
there was wireless video. And companies have been showing wireless video demos
since I can remember. Very nice demos of high definition TV and neat setups
using 802.11, and later UWB. Lots of cool stuff. CES after CES I saw these demos
and really it wasn't going anywhere. And it was hard to understand why. Is it
really that consumers don't want wireless? Why is it just staying in the arena
of demos?
Actually,
Amimon was founded in a way that raised a small amount of seed money that was
spent of market validation and market research. Part of what we did is just
analysis of the market, but a lot of it was actually talking to the customers,
talking to the CE vendors. Then we raised our round A to start developing our
solution. Through this process of talking to the customers, we understood that
the entire industry has really got it wrong at the time. What they didn't figure
out correctly was that in order to deliver wireless video in a way that could
actually provide a replacement or alternative to wires, is you have to deliver
uncompressed video. You need to be able to accept the uncompressed video. Most
of the wireless demos and most of the companies demonstrating wireless assumed
that the video was in compressed format.
People
thought "The video is high definition, it is 20 Mbps, and we can take that
compressed video and put it onto one of the very successful wireless standards
that was already proven, either 802.11 or the emerging UWB. And we can then
decode it, and that's a great solution". But what they got wrong is that while
it made for a very good demo, and you could do very nice demos using that
concept, you can't make any usable product. The consumer can't really enjoy the
benefits of that because practically, in most cases, the video is provided at
the output of video sources in uncompressed format, after it's been decoded. And
that isn't going to change. There are various reasons why that is true. Copy
protection is one, interoperability issues is the other. Many issues, but the
fact is that if you look at the wired world, you see that pretty much 100% of
all the connections are with uncompressed video. We identified that and we
concluded that if one is going to replace uncompressed wires, one has to do it
with uncompressed wireless. And while it seems pretty obvious, we saw that the
industry really was searching to do solutions based on compressed video. Not
because their analysis went wrong, its partly that, but its also because its
much easier. So they were really looking for the key next to the keyhole in that
respect.
We
identified the real answer. The first novelty of Amimon was identifying the need
for uncompressed video. We were really pioneers in that respect. That was the
first part of the novelty, but that's not enough because there is a reason why
no one did it; it's just ridiculously difficult. We're talking about 1.5 Gbps
for 1080i. Its 3 Gbps when its uncompressed 1080p. How do you deliver that
wirelessly? That is the second part of the novelty of Amimon. So the first was
identifying the need correctly. And the second was once we identified the need
correctly, how do we solve this problem. The composition of the founding team
was very important to solving this problem because the second part of what the
entire industry was doing incorrectly was that they were trying to use data
modems to deliver video. Whether it was 802.11 or UWB, and they could call it
whatever media terms, whether it was WiMedia or various other 802.11-related
terms that suggest it was intended for video, but actually there were really a
lot of things added to the standards that were patches to try to fit a data
modem for an application of video. They do an OK job in some cases, but they are
not a real true fit. What we decided to do is really start from a clean slate,
from scratch, and design the optimized solution to deliver video wirelessly.
Based on our very good understanding of wireless, modems, and video, based on
the composition of the founding team, we concluded that the best and practically
the only way to deliver uncompressed video was with modem specifically designed
for video. So we invented what we
call the video modem approach, which is the foundation of WHDI (wireless high
definition interface). That concept is really based on the premise that we know
the information is video. Let's not just treat it as random data- let's make use
of that knowledge to optimize the solution for the video stream. So that is the
foundation of Amimon. We have designed the world's first video modem, a modem
that is specifically optimized to deliver video wirelessly.
George:
It sounds like there is a significant amount of information theory that was key
to developing the approach here. Is that the correct way to look at this?
Noam:
Absolutely. It's a good thing that one of our founders is a professor in
information theory. It's exactly that.
Transmission
rate in communications doesn't follow Moore's Law. Advancing communications is
just really a meticulous process of improving a little bit by a little bit over
time. And it takes a generation to radically improve the utilization of a
communication path unless you think out of the box. And there have been cases
where communications experts have thought out of the box and suddenly you had
big leaps of improvements, whether it was the invention of Trellis Coded
Modulation or the change from analog modems to digital modems in telephony, so
there have been historically some cases of quick leaps, but it's really out of
the box thinking that brought those changes. Data modems based on WiFi, UWB, are
all around 400-500 Mbps of data communications and video is 3 Gbps for
uncompressed 1080p and following the regular path of trying to improve the same
parameters that everyone knows about is the wrong approach and will not result
in any big change. What led us to the video modem solution really was thinking
out of the box. In this case, out of the box required a deep understanding of
information theory aspects. As you asked, yes it requires an understanding of
information theory to make the leap from just a slightly faster data modem, to a
radically different solution that can actually solve this problem.
George:
This leads very well into the question of how does wireless HDI (WHDI) differ
from some of the other wideband alternatives? Not to pick on ultrawideband in
particular, but Ultrawideband is certainly an example of one of the competing
technologies.
Noam:
Yes, that ties in very well to the question. Let's separate out the alternatives
to WHDI into two categories. One has been considered by many as an alternative
or competition but really isn't. This category includes all the technologies
that are limited to the area of compressed video. That includes 802.11n, which
is a data modem and there are solutions that use that data modem to deliver
video.. 802.11n has peak nominal rates of 600 Mbps using a 40 MHz the channel.
That is way below what is needed to deliver uncompressed video. Uncompressed
1080p, for example is 3 Gbps. That is five times more than the peak nominal rate
of 802.11n. Now, everyone knows that in wireless you can't rely on the peak
nominal rate, you need to back off, and back off significantly. A good rule of
thumb is at least 3x. So we are talking about an order of magnitude difference
between WHDI and 802.11n. UWB likewise. UWB is just a generic term for a type of
modulation. It's really used interchangeably with WiMedia. So WiMedia is the
actual implementation of UWB. I use that as well. When I refer to WiMedia I
usually use UWB, but just to make sure we are on the same page here, WiMedia is
a great standard, potentially very successful, but not a good fit for
uncompressed video. WiMedia is 480 Mbps, it's really not designed from the
ground up to deliver uncompressed video, it really looks and feels and smells
like USB. And it's not surprising that the most popular application for WiMedia
is wireless USB. It's a good fit for that. USB is 480 Mbps, it's used for
accessories, it's used for computer peripherals, it's not used to connect my TV
to my main video source. So WiMedia can really only be successful as wireless
USB. It's not going to be successful as a replacement for uncompressed video
wires because the rates are way too low. Likewise we have nothing against
802.11n. I think it's a great standard. I think it's one of the best, if not the
best ever. But it's a data modem standard and it will be a great alternative to
Gbit Ethernet. We have no customer that at any given time needs to decide
whether to use 802.11n or us. If the customer has the option of using 802.11n in
their application, typically I would recommend them to use 802.11n. Because that
would mean that that customer has access to compressed video, so it's delivering
data. It's not delivering uncompressed video. So 802.11n, UWB are really
technologies that are limited to compressed applications, and they are not our
competition, they are not alternatives to WHDI.
Now there are alternatives. There are
other companies that are addressing the same problem that we are. We don't think
they are very good alternatives, but they definitely are competing with us in
addressing similar applications. I would group them into three basic categories
in addition to WHDI.
So just as a
recap, WHDI accepts uncompressed HDTV up to uncompressed 1080i. It delivers it
in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, similar to the 802.11a spectrum. It uses OFDM, it
uses MIMO, it uses a lot of the same building blocks as 802.11n, with one
fundamental difference that it uses a video modem approach as opposed to a data
modem approach. That is a recap of our approach to wireless uncompressed video.
The other three approaches are very different. No other company is using the
same frequency band that we are. Other companies are using the following
different approaches. One approach is extended UWB, so not WiMedia but rather an
attempt to take WiMedia and stretch it in various directions. This is a
direction that doesn't seem to be going very well for those promoting it. This
really, I believe, is a lost cause because as I mentioned before, if you just go
incrementally using techniques that have been optimized by all of the best modem
engineers out there, you cannot make major advances. Just trying to take the
WiMedia protocol and stretching it in a parameter space that is known, with more
spectrum, more power, more whatever, is not going to get you what you need. So
trying to stretch UWB to fit is not going to work and is probably the worst
alternative to WHDI.
The other
two approaches seem to be getting more traction in the market. One is an
approach that combines a data modem, specifically UWB WiMedia, with a very good
real time compression engine. The approach says let take the uncompressed video
and compress it back real time to a rate that is low enough that could be
delivered on a generic data modem, like WiMedia. Probably the best compression
engine out there is based on JPEG 2000. And not surprisingly, the proponents of
this approach have selected that and they have done a good job in selecting the
best compression engine. That is an approach that seems to almost work. It works
with some various constraints. I will mention some of the big advantages of WHDI
over that approach. The problem with JPEG 2000 plus UWB is that it is an
expensive solution. As I said the best compression engine is based on JPEG 2000.
But the best comes at a price. It is a very complex solution. JPEG 2000 was
originally designed for digital cameras, to improve the compression ratio of the
pictures. And yet no digital camera uses it because it is expensive. In the long
run this is a solution that really needs to get down to $10, $5 per unit if you
really want it to be successful. That combination of high powered, very complex
compression engine plus a UWB data modem doesn't have the path to become a low
cost solution. So, that is one problem: the cost. Second problem is robustness.
The more you compress, the more sensitive you become in a wireless channel, your
errors start propagating and you have lost blocks and that delivery of
compressed over wireless is a problem. And then the last major problem is the
range. UWB, while it has a lot of promise for peripheral connectivity, doesn't
really have the range to provide a good, multiuse answer to the problems
wireless users want to solve. Connecting my TV to my set top box that is right
next to it, is a small part of the connectivity problem that users would like
solved, . Sometimes I want to connect my computer that is in the other room and
sometimes I want to connect one more TV that is in another bedroom, and
sometimes I would like to connect my under-the-counter TV that is in my kitchen.
And I really don't want to confine myself to a limited range Even if most of the
applications can be addressed. it is still not good enough, especially if you
have an alternative. I would say as a comparison that if you went to a BMW
dealership and the dealer said, "Here I have a BMW that can go a maximum of 70
Mph," you know that most of the time you don't drive more than 70, but chances
are you would prefer that BMW that can go to 100, even though, of course, none
of us pass the speed limit. You can't design a solution based on what most
people will use it for most of the time. You really need to design a standard
that is comprehensive. So for UWB,
the range is an issue. People are talking about trying to pass walls into other
rooms, but realistically that is not going to happen.
Power
limitations imposed by regulators are severe in the US and almost draconian in
Europe. So UWB is good for certain applications but it is not good for wireless
video solutions because of the range limitations. What the proponents of this
solution have going for them right now is that it is a solution based system.
You can take off-the-shelf UWB and off-the-shelf JPEG and combine it with a CPU
and you have a solution. That is what gave the proponents of UWB time to market
advantage because the components were available. So there is a limited time to
market advantage for this approach but if it does not fit then it doesn't fit.
And time to market is not going to give enough advantage for it to be around for
the run-lun. That is something that once we have WHDI chips in the market I
think their advantages will be so compelling that there will be no reason to do
UWB / JPEG2000.
The second
approach is in my view a better alternative than the UWB JPEG combo. It's the 60
GHz approach. The proponents of the 60 GHz approach have put together a special
interest group of CE manufacturers that are defining a solution for 60 GHz. I
have a lot of good things to say about 60 GHz. We are not a 5 GHz company. We
use 5 GHz, but it's not inherent to our solution. We are a video modem company.
We are proponents of video modems. We are not religious about 5 GHz. We chose 5
GHz because it was a sweet spot for this application. It's a very mature;
bread-and-butter technology already
today. It's basic. Lots of vendors have been through 5 GHz. Yields are high,
it's cheap, its mature, it's proven- all good stuff. That's what 5 GHz is today.
Also the good news is that 5 GHz is really still an underutilized spectrum.
2.4 GHz is a mess. It's a jungle of wireless transmissions. It continues
to be even worse. The installed base is just so high that like a magnet, it
attracts more and more WiFi applications. And even 802.11n, while it has a 5 GHz
mode, the first products are all going to be 2.4 GHz. So that will probably be
the biggest use of 802.11n in the near term. And it will take time for that to
change. So 2.4GHz is very crowded and has limited spectrum and is attracting
more and more transmitters. 5 GHz has much more spectrum and is much, much less
crowded. So it's really a sweet spot of a mature technology that is leveraging
RF that has been developed for WiFi and is really still underutilized with
plenty of spectrum. And more and more spectrum is being added to that space.
There are over 30 channels you could use in the U.S. We do lots of demos and
when we first began this, we always brought along a spectrum analyzer to look
for a clear frequency band. Today I don't bother. Chances are it will free.
And the WHDI chips implement a solution for automatic channel selection
to make sure there is no interference and that there is coexistence with WiFi.
This makes sure that 5 GHz will be a very good home for our technology for the
foreseeable future and easily for the next 3 or 5 years.
That said,
we always are happy to see opportunities to expand our capabilities as well. And
60 GHz seems to be the next frontier. We do think that it is the next frontier,
but we also think that frontier is pretty far away.
We think that it is great news that there is this untapped, huge amount
of spectrum in the 60 GHz band and sooner or later we will run out of spectrum.
So when we are successful and every house will have five WHDI TVs, it really
will take that. Even if every house has two, 5 GHz will probably be good enough.
But if every house will have 5 WHDI TVs and 3 802.11n routers,
a house that we cannot imagine today, but may happen. If it happens, it's
always good to be prepared and 60 GHz will be a good place to expand into.
That's in one direction. In another direction is in a Wall Street trading house
with one hundred monitors all in the same room_ there as well we may run out of
steam. Because one hundred monitors in one room is another challenge. Again,
that is not a typical house, but it is an application for which
we would also like to eliminate those wires. And there again, 60 GHz may
be a good way to go.
Another
thing to consider is that today everyone is buying 1080p TVs, but I think that
in 10 years time 1080p will be old news. I think that 4K pixels per screen will
be 'the' thing. I think that 8K will be in the high end houses. At least I hope
to have one like that. It's a moving target and we need to think about the
direction things will move in. We think that 60 GHz will solve the problem of
delivering content to an 8K TV with 120 Hertz refresh rate.
But the current implementations of 60 GHz cannot accomplish this with
their data modem approach. Nor will they be able to solve the 8K pixel TV
problem. There is plenty of spectrum in 60 GHz, but if you use it inefficiently,
you will run out. One thing that we are adamant about is that regardless of the
frequency band, the video modem approach will be the right approach and the data
modem approach will be the wrong approach. We think that the right way to go is
to use WHDI today in the 5GHz unlicensed band. It's based on mature technology,
its proven, its real, its ready for prime time. When in the future we need to
expand to these new frontiers, 60 GHz will be a complement. It won't be a
replacement. But it will be a complement for those high end applications. This
is because we will always need modes of 5 GHz. There are a few reasons why. 60
GHz, while it has great potential, has some severe limitations that one needs to
understand in order to make use of it correctly.
One is that it is range limited. Propagation of 60 GHz is not nearly as
far as 5 GHz. While 60 GHz will always be good enough for inside a room,
crossing a wall will be a serious stretch. Another thing is 60 GHz is very
directional. It's physics- it's not going to change. The higher the frequency,
the smaller the antennas, the more directional the beam is, its starting to be
more like a laser. And when it's directional, you need to figure out smart ways
to calibrate and set up your system. There are automatic ways, and everyone
working in 60 GHz knows that, and most of the effort in 60 GHz has been to solve
these basic flaws of trying to create beam steering solutions and there have
been advances but I would say it will be a while before these are really
commercially available. And even when they are it will always be a problem
because when the beam is very directional, it will not be very robust. 60 GHz is
one of the resonance frequencies of water. Any mist in the air can degrade the
quality of the transmission. There is a reason why it is an unlicensed band;
because no one wants to transmit in that band. So there are ways to overcome
these limitations but there will always be problems that limit the performance
of the solution, and that's even in the distant future. 60 GHz will always be a
partial solution. And that's OK when its complementing other technologies like
WHDI. My belief is that the right approach is to start WHDI, at 5 GHZ, with a
video modem solution. It works, its real, its proven, its demoed, its cheap. And
slowly as 60 GHz technology improves, directionality issues have been resolved,
prices have gone down, yields have improved, technology has become more mature,
we will develop a WHDI solution for 60Ghz. When you use short range you will use
60 GHz, when you use long range, you will use 5 GHz. But we will always use a
video modem because that is always the right way.
George:
That's the most effective way to use the channel
Noam:
That's right. Always. So that is my belief. It is inconsistent with the current
proponents of 60 GHz that are using data modems. So I said some good things
about 60 GHz. Now I'll say a few less good things. They are not ready for prime
time. They are not ready for wide spread, mainstream applications. Its not
robust enough, its not mature enough, it hasn't resolved the issues well enough
to be ready. It is good as the next frontier as a complement to WHDI and my hope
is that WHDI 2.0 will include 60 GHz and may even converge with the 60 GHz
standard. Maybe.
But
currently our belief is to use 5 GHz first because that works.
WHDI is not
a competitor to 60 GHz, its not a competitor to wireless HD, really. There is
going to be a strong overlap between companies that are doing both wireless HD
and WHDI. The main difference is that wireless HD is really to start preparing
for that next frontier and lots of companies want to do that. And I think it
makes a lot of sense and I think it's a smart thing. And yet those same
companies may want to come out with wireless products in 2008 and in that case
they will want to support WHDI. So while wireless HD may seem like a competitor,
its really not.
George:
I had some other thoughts about 60 GHz. Its really arguing about what the
physical layer is, not really even how the signal is modulated.
Noam:
I would say our fundamental issue is we need to use a video modem.
George:
Something that allows you to transmit uncompressed video.
Noam:
And to make use of the fact that we know its video information. To give an
example of why we think that we can also run in 60 GHz; we can do in a 40 MHz
channel in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, the same quality as a HDMI cable. And that
is the equivalent of 3 Gbps of video. Now we can't deliver 3 Gbps of data, we
can deliver 3 Gbps of video. The current proponents of 60 GHz are proposing to
deliver 3 Gbps of video using multiple GHz of spectrum. More than an order of
magnitude more spectrum than what we are using. To deliver the same amount of
information. That is inefficient. Now they can get away with it because there is
that spectrum today. But if they want to move to the next step, they may not get
away with it any more. If we can do 3 Gbps in 40 MHz, just imagine what we can
do in 400. So we are really unlimited. To use a data modem approach in 60 GHz,
which doesn't utilize a lot of the things that we do, in the short term they
will get away with it. But once its ready for primetime, they will be too
inefficient to address the high-end applications
George:
I had a question about how WHDI is related to 802.11n, but I think that the
bigger question is what are you doing about engaging with standards bodies and I
think one of the obvious ones is the WiFi Alliance, particularly where 802.11n
is concerned. But any other information about engaging with standards bodies is
good also.
Noam:
802.11n is a very important standard that we need to address how we complement
and co-exist with. A lot of it because we share the same frequency band, and we
also share a lot of the same basic building blocks. We use MIMO, we use OFDM,
actually our solution looks a lot like 802.11n with that one exception of the
video modem element that we have and that 802.11n doesn't have. On the other
hand, 802.11n has things that we don't have like a data MAC and something like
an Ethernet based protocol to give it the capabilities of data networking. So we
have a lot of synergies and there are also a lot of differences.
So how we
tie in to 802.11n needs to be addressed. But that said, the main standardization
body that we need to engage with to help define WHDI is actually not WiFi and
it's not IEEE. The main reason is that it really is not in the IEEE's charter to
develop application standards. The IEEE charter is really more concerned with
the MAC and PHY layer. Therefore, even technologies that are using 802.11n are
not necessarily standardized in the IEEE. For example the DLNA, that is a great
activity, but it really couldn't have been done in the IEEE. We will go in a
similar path but one that is closer to HDMI. So it's still a standardization
activity but it is done by a special interest group of consumer electronic and
PC companies that have an interest to make this into a standard. So in 2007 we
are going to put together a group of companies that will define WHDI and it will
be an independent consortium of companies that together make this an industry
standard. What that really means is that Amimon is willing to license the
technology in a way that is consistent with what CE manufacturers expect in
terms of IP licensing to enable a wide spread standard. We are fully prepared to
license in a manner that even enables our competitors to provide solutions that
will be WHDI standard compliant. So we are starting the special interest group
in 2007 with the plan to have WHDI standard devices in 2008. It's going to be a
relatively quick path from standard definition to products because it's based on
our existing, proven WHDI technology.
I mentioned
WHDI range before. Apart from being able to give you more capabilities, there is
something more fundamental in what range gives you. And that is the capability
to expand the feature set of the standard. So if you are building an in-room
wireless link solution, what it really means is that you are doing a cable
replacement. Now WHDI is not a cable replacement solution. It's much more. It's
really a whole home connectivity-net. A cable has two connectors and a line
between and it really connects one point to one point. By definition, it is a
point to point solution. The nice thing about wireless is that it is naturally
multipoint to multipoint. If I am a TV vendor I need to decide if I will have
one or two or three HDMI connectors. Because it is a point to point, I need to
know exactly how many points are on each side. Inherently WHDI has the
capability of switching. If I have one WHDI receiver in a TV, I can connect to
100 WHDI transmitters and I can always add one more. Likewise, if I have one
WHDI transmitter in my PC or in my set top box I could, if I want to and if I am
allowed, transmit to as many TVs as
I want to. So it is something inherent in wireless that is better than wired. So
now not only are we providing the benefit of not having wires tying us down, but
we are offering much more functionality than wired. And that is this the
connectivity-net. It is not a network like 802.11 is, but rather it is like a
switch panel, it's like a matrix of devices. I have a home with lots of displays
and I have a home with lots of sources and what having WHDI means is that you
can connect any one of those sources in the house to any one of those displays
in the house and that is what only WHDI can do. In fact only WHDI is suggesting
that it is possible to do this.
WHDI will
enable you to turn on your TV, get a menu of available sources. You can connect
to any source that is WHDI enabled at that time. And also sources that don't
have wireless but wired HDMI protocols can connect through a bridging device
that enables them to join the party as well.
George:
So its another example of wireless enabling a new application much more
economically that really was only possible before with a great deal of expense.
Noam:
Exactly. And really the most successful examples of wireless standards are those
that do not purely replace the cables but actually offer new capabilities.
Cordless phones were nice and fine and successful, but cell phones - wow! Now I
can talk in my car and I can talk wherever I am. It changed life because it
changed the functionality of phones. This similarly is not just a question of
replacing an ugly wire. But WHDI now also offers a new functionality.
While I
painted this picture of a brave new world, there are some other points to
consider. One of the reasons we are able to do this whole home networking and
other attempts have not been that successful is the basic building block. So we
don't forget our basic video modem building block. That is the enabler of
everything. Once we have that we can actually achieve this multi-feature set
solution. It is pointless to suggest a multi-feature set, grand scale
connectivity network without having the basic ingredient that would enable it.
If you limit yourself to compressed video, which doesn't exist in most
applications, you don't have what it takes to get there. So when people say we
are not the first to say it, I would agree, but we are the first to actually
have the right ingredient to enable it.
We don't
want to reinvent things that have already been invented. We want to leverage
other very good activities to help complete our story. Really, what we bring is
this key ingredient of the video modem that can take uncompressed video and
deliver it across the house. We are now expanding on that to build a complete
protocol. But there are lots of really good activities that we can tie into and
leverage, whether it's DLNA, or various copy protection mechanisms, whether it's
other data networking protocols, like 802.11n, that we will not in any way
replace. But rather we are trying to tie them all together and add that one key
ingredient that will really enable the completion of this story of the networked
home. Data networking will always be side by side with video networking. Our
goal is to expand this coexistence because we actually share a lot of building
blocks with 802.11n, to eventually have a single chip that does both 802.11n and
WHDI. Given that today the cost of chips is mainly the silicon area, you get the
one essentially for free when you implement the other given that there is an
80-90% overlap between them. Lots of
applications will want both. Think of 100 million notebooks that will all have
802.11n, why not for free be able to have them deliver all their video or
graphic content wirelessly to the TV?
George:
So you mentioned the topic of licensing, you mentioned the topic of providing a
product set that was attractive to the CE manufacturers. What are your 'go to
market' and sales strategies?
Noam:
Our first products, those that are available this year, are more similar to
point to point cable replacements than the ultimate goal we just spoke of. These
are chips that are really aimed to allow TV customers to sell a wireless TV. And
what that means is that they will sell a TV in two pieces. You will open the
box, take out the panel, hang it on the wall, and in the same box will be a
connector box that you will put where your set top box is. It's a great product
and we do have TV customers that will offer that in 2008. Another example is
aftermarket for those who unfortunately bought their TV already before wireless
was available; for those users we have customers that will offer aftermarket
wireless video extender dongle products. These dongles will be sold in complete
transmitter/receiver sets at your favorite retailer.
One more neat application is home projectors. Home projector market is
growing slowly and one of the main inhibitors of that market is installation and
connectivity. Offering a wireless link make actually boost this market. This is
really lots of point to point solutions in the house, not our end goal.
Even in
phase 1 we can start stretching the model. Whoever offers the dongle sets can
offer one extra receiver or transmitter that you can purchase separately that
could tie into the dongle-set you already purchased, thereby creating a small
network of connected sources and displays.
Phase 2 is
our standard based solution. That will probably support our first generation
protocol and will now allow the assurance of cross vendor interoperability. So
now I have a TV by one OEM and can immediately connect to my
set top box from another OEM without buying any other hardware. So phase
2 is still point to point, but completely flexible and standard-based.
Phase 3 is
kind of the Holy Grail, the end goal. That is enabling any device in the home to
connect to any display and that is something that enables delivery from portable
devices, high end, low end, legacy, new, old. It has the protocol that will tell
you what to connect and how. It will have both low and high power modes to
accommodate different devices. And yet one needs to be cautious because that is
too much to start with. So we will gradually get there by going through the
three phases of development I just outlined. One of the important things we are
doing right now is making sure that we do not build the current standardization
with dead-ends that burden the end goal. Everything that will be defined in WHDI
will enable that goal and yet we won't necessarily try to define it all from the
outset.
George:
is there anything else you would like to say in summary?
More information about Amimon here...
This interview ran in our August 27, 2007 newsletter issue.
emerging wireless marketplace