A group of ultrawideband companies have teamed up to try to spread the word on the technology within academia.
Paris Ultrawideband Systems, or PUBS, hopes to encourage student experimentation with UWB and dispel some of the common myths about the technology, according to Kai Siwiak of Time Derivative. Siwiak, who was a senior member of the technical staff at Motorola Labs and later a vice president at Time Domain before starting his own consulting group, said the idea for the group arose from a conversation he had with Artimi CEO Jack Lang at a pub in Paris (thus the name) during the UWB summit there last month.
Siwiak and Lang, who is also Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Cambridge, discussed the fact that ultrawideband has not yet surfaced in most university-level communications curricula. They reasoned that this was probably because it's difficult to get hardware. So, he said, "we noodled it for a second and figured out that you could build a pretty darn simple but well-working radio using off-the-shelf components."
One of the myths that the group is out to disprove is that UWB is complex and expensive. "You can do it for a few dollars worth of parts," Siwiak said. "You're not going to get a really great operating system, but you're going to get enough to do some serious study."
PUBS members, which, in addition to Time Derivative and Artimi, include Pulse-Link, Time Domain and Discrete Time Communications (a U.K.-based consulting company not to be confused with Staccato Communications, which was formerly called Discrete Time), have agreed to consult with students who are interested in studying UWB. "If students have questions, these guys are on tap to answer questions."
Siwiak has also written a reference book on UWB that he hopes will be used in university classrooms. "I'm trying to make this stuff accessible to a larger number of people. It's not magic -- it's physics."
The book, "Ultra-Wideband Radio Technology," was co-written with Debra McKeown and is due out in May. Siwiak said they tried to write the book in a manner that someone without a technical background could understand it, but at the same time provide enough detail that it would also be useful to engineers in the field. He credits his co-author with helping to make a highly technical subject more understandable. "The technobabble parts are mine," he said, "and the readable parts are hers."
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