TZero Technologies and UWB for Consumer Electronics

TZero Technologies looks to be one company to watch in the UWB for consumer electronics space. The company fell of the UWB radar a couple of years ago when the former CEO decided to take the company's development toward "no-new-wires" solutions for the service provider space. However, in a market that is already heavily leaning toward HomePNA, MoCA, or powerline (mostly in Europe), this wasn't attainable. So, the company brought back Dr. Rajeev Krisnamoorthy as its CEO, got some new personnel from Airgo, and went back to focusing on UWB for "wireless HD" applications.

To date, TZero has two announced products:

• In February, TZero announced that Hitachi was using its UWB solution for a line of Ultra Thin (UT) HDTVs. Hitachi has removed the tuner component for these TVs, making them very slim.
• At the CEDIA show, Gefen announced a Wireless for HDMI Extender using TZero's solution. This product is positioned as a cable replacement solution that allows AV devices such as Blu-ray players, AV receivers, and televisions to link via high-quality connections but without the HDMI cables themselves.

As we look at the new wave of wireless and wired solutions for high-definition video streaming, Gefen will be an interesting company to watch. They've hedged their bets in the wireless HDMI space, showing the aforementioned TZero product as well as one from AMIMON (WHDI), a 60 GHz technology. Furthermore, they use Pulse~LINK's proprietary algorithm for an HDMI-over-coax extender. This can distribute an HDMI signal 300 meters.