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Free love among the docking stations and a UWB reality check
Interesting talk yesterday with Jason Slaughter, product manager at DisplayLink, which was known as Newnham Research until late last year. It designs software and chips that can drive monitors across virtually any physical or fast wireless link.
A virtual graphics card is created on the PC which sends a compressed data stream typically across a USB 2.0 lead, allowing it to drive a monitor. As we reported yesterday, one use is in docking stations, when the USB lead also carries keyboard, mouse and audio data, allowing docking stations to mate with any notebook. One lead and they are anybody's.
The USB 2.0 lead can be replaced by a wireless USB 2.0 link, an emerging technology that uses Ultrawideband (UWB) radio instead of the physical cable. DisplayLink's system adjusts to the available data rate, and reduces latency by tricks like transmitting mouse clicks immediately, without waiting for a frame to be sent. "The response is very crisp - not like you get with some wireless systems," said Slaughter.
I wrote a couple of days back on the profound effect UWB display links could eventually have on the digital home, when potentially any device could use any monitor. This in turn could increase the popularity of small ultra-mobiles because they could always use a big screen when required.
One thing puzzled me about reports of Displaylink's demonstration of a wireless PC-monitor link at the 3GSM show. Its high-end chip can stream data for a 2-megapixel display, enough for high-definition; USB 2.0 is rated at 480Mbits/sec, again well fast enough for HD even allowing for the fact that real-throughput will be more like 200-250Mbits/sec. Yet a video stream of "only" DVD quality was mentioned,
But Slaughter says that if you are playing a DVD video and scaling it up to a 1280 by 1024 PC screen you are in fact dealing with a data rate close to that of HD TV.
More surprising to me was his revelation that Displaylink was getting only 20-30Mbit/sec out of the Wireless USB link - a tenth of the real data rate of the wired version, and roughly what you would get from a good Wifi 11g connection.
"Pure radio to radio is very much faster," said Slaughter. "I've seen [UWB alliance] WiMedia guys demonstrating 1Gigabit/sec. But as soon as you get into the real world things are very different."
Current products are loading in the Media Access Control, WiMedia, and USB.2.0 protocol stacks, all of which take a penalty and are designed for wired rather that wireless links, Slaughter said. Devices using the links treat them as ordinary wired connections, and the data stream has to pass through compatibility layers. But a direct access mode will cut through a lot of this stuff.
"I see no reason why these things should not be solved. By the end of this year we should be seeing real data rates of 150-200Mbits/sec - and that's on today's hardware."
Slaughter said UWB products using DisplayLink's technology will not appear until data rates reach this level. Incidentally the demonstration system used an Intel Wireless USB on the PC side an Alereon module on the monitor side.
Posted by Clive Akass on February 16, 2007 | Permalink
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