WTRS Executive Interview

Interview with Stephen Wood, President of the WiMedia Alliance.

May 14, 2008

George: Can you tell us a little about your background and what is your day job?

Stephen: To start off in reverse order. The day job is working for Intel as a technology strategist in the Digital Home Group. And principally what I'm responsible for doing there is trying to figure out what will be happening in the future and taking the appropriate steps to make it occur in a productive manner.

As to my background, I started off with a BS in Computer Science from Texas A&M and I have since been working in communications. Starting with Mainframe communications, local area network wired, moving to wireless LAN designs using leaky coax of all things. (It was a really nice well behaved network while it lasted although it didn't last long.)

Then I moved into cellular technologies, wireless local loop and ultimately into radio PAN technologies.

George: So the theme that runs through your whole career history is around networking technologies and evolving into wireless networking.

Stephen: Networking technologies evolving into wireless and points beyond. Applications of wireless and multimedia networking and those types of things.

George: How did you come to lead the WiMedia Alliance?

Stephen: It was a long and tortuous path, it began back with the IEEE 802.15.3a committee. We looked at the fact that there were 23 proposals on the table and said "We're going to be here forever." The first thing we did was looked for proposals that had some commonality. Four of us got together at, as I remember correctly, a café in Sunnyvale, CA and we sat down and we said we simply have got to find a way to merge these things, and that started an effort to do OFDM-based technologies. And when TI became involved they brought the idea of multi-banding into the equation. It was a superior design and we switched over and changed the name accordingly. That is where you got the Multiband OFDM Alliance. That merged into WiMedia, we realized that there was so much overlap between the two organizations - the same people, just different meetings - and we decided to stop the inefficiency and merged the two organizations. I think I forgot to step backward when they asked for volunteers and everybody else did.

George: You were the guy in the corner talking and everybody else left the room.

Stephen: Exactly. I think I'm just about to finish my third term.

George: What is it important for everybody to understand about the WiMedia Alliance? What is the mission of the WiMedia Alliance?

Stephen: WiMedia is targeting PAN radio development. What's important to remember about it is something that is unique to how WiMedia approaches things. Most SIGs try to develop a top to bottom solution They build the radio they build the protocol stack, all the way to the very top of the equation. We looked at that in the PAN environment and said, "If we do that here we are going to have at least a half dozen different radios all attempting to use essentially a common approach and they are going to conflict with each other due to various incompatibilities and we will have mayhem in the PAN space". So we said "We have to rethink how we are approaching this."

So what we did was to design the common radio platform. WiMedia will design the radio and we will put it into what we think of as a toolkit. And we will put other parts into it like association and maybe an IP protocol stack. And we will make these parts and toolkit elements available to other SIGS so that if they need a radio they can come to us, get the parts that they need, and know that they will work. Know that they won't conflict with other SIGs and will at least co-exist politely. Then we will gain efficiencies and eliminate some of the problems we see in the market that we anticipate because of that strategy. That's a completely different way to approach it. We obviously got cooperation from Bluetooth and USB Implementers Forum in that vein. We will continue making the radios available to other SIGs as the need arises. We would expect to be recruiting other SIGs along the way as we proceed.

George: Today the WiMedia Alliance has the common radio which is the UWB radio. Do you have a roadmap for adding other radios under this umbrella?

Stephen: Well to answer your question directly, yes. To answer it a little less directly, we are going to be taking the existing UWB radio into some interesting directions. We will be taking the UWB radio and trying to make it more power efficient for hand held type applications that may not be able to take advantage of the full bandwidth potential of these devices, and for those devices that have, for instance, mains power, they may be interested in going for absolute maximum throughput. And so that's the second path that we'll be taking.

Our structure is to provide any radio design that may be necessary in the PAN community and so I expect that it will involve other technologies in the future, although we haven't made any explicit announcements.

George: One of the key factors that we saw to accelerating the success of the multiband OFDM radios was the loose alliance between the WiMedia Alliance and the Bluetooth SIG, and the WiMedia Alliance and the USB Implementers Forum to implement the Certified Wireless USB protocol. Is this a model for how you see the WiMedia Alliance evolving in the future? As not only a radio technology, but adding more specialized or special purpose protocols to the Alliance mix. Can you talk about how going forward the WiMedia Alliance would evolve around both radio technology and around different protocols?

Stephen: Absolutely. The way that we see the world is that we are in a period of intense convergence. The PC, CE, and the mobile handset environment are all converging with their various protocols, capabilities, and applications. And so we saw a need to handle the market differently.

Instead of organizing the market into vertical slices, we have decided to organize this segment into horizontal slices. The WiMedia's portion of it is the PHY/MAC radio, principally. We may fill in a niche here or there if there is demand and nobody is in a position to do it. But generally speaking we will try to maintain our horizontal structure in order to minimize the amount of consumer conflict that occurs naturally between the SIGs. And so, to that extent, wherever there is a unique protocol application, SIG, or organization, that may need to take advantage of the radio, we will be looking to expand the eco-system to incorporate those organizations. We are actively in conversation with several at this moment, some of whom may or may not ultimately pan out. But what we try to do is to make sure that we have a common toolkit of radios that we can offer to these folks to solve the problem that they are experiencing.

It seems like an extraordinarily good model and we expect it to continue. And the convergence will essentially force that to happen more and more as we move forward in this market.

George: Yes, we agree. The question that we throw around between us, which is more along the lines of a sophomore year brainstorming session, is the convergence driving the behavior of organizations like the WiMedia Alliance, the Bluetooth SIG, and the USB Implementers Forum, or is are the alliances driving the convergence. I suspect that it really is a 'chicken and egg' problem and both things are happening simultaneously.

Stephen: I am confident that, yes, both things are happening, no question about it. But fundamentally consumer demand drives everything. We can build anything you like to, but it doesn't do you any good unless the consumer wants it. And so that is going to guide everything. The consumer is looking, for instance, to have a movie or a song. They don't necessarily want to have it on a device and have it quarantined there. They want to be able to move it wherever they wish to. They may wish to hear the song on their stereo, they may wish to hear it on their IPOD, they may wish to listen to it while they are working on their PC. And so to enable that functionality, we have to establish common communication protocols. That is what causes the convergence to occur. Although we don't think we are driving it, we do believe we are providing optimum solutions that enable it to come to fruition.

George: That's a very good point. So finally, what did I forget to ask you today?

Stephen: "How are you guys doing?"

George: How are you guys doing by the way?

Stephen: We're doing wonderfully thank you very much. We are in the process of introducing a variety of new chip products that are beginning to start hitting the market. We are seeing penetration into laptop products. We have completed certification testing on our first dual band radios to address some of the higher frequency needs of the cellular community. And those will be starting to ship in the not-too-distant future. Although we are at an early stage of the market, we are really quite pleased at how the roll-out is going and the robustness of the interoperability that we are seeing. We will continue working to refine some of the bumps we see in our process, but in general we are very happy with how it's going.

More information about WiMedia Alliance here...

This interview ran in our May 14, 2008 newsletter issue.