Amimon Launches Wireless Video Interface Technology

By: STEPHEN LAS MARIAS, EDITOR
( 1 May 2007 )

Wireless Design and Development Asia recently spoke with Noam Geri, president, marketing and business

development, AMIMON Inc., about his company’s Wireless High Definition Interface (WHDI) technology. Excerpts:

 

How important is being the first to come up with this wireless display interface technology?

If you look at the wired world, we see hundreds of millions of video devices connected in a wired way with uncompressed connectivity. The only reason why there has no true wireless version of the very common wired interfaces like HDMI and DVI is because that they are technically very difficult to do. Amimon is the first company to actually be able to do such high performance wireless connection, and that puts us in the position of really being able to define a new standard for connectivity. We are planning to do a new standard for wireless display connectivity, and being the first will allow us to shape and influence the industry in this direction. 

What do you think are the main issues regarding the wireless display interface industry today?

We are not the only one that is trying to address this space. However, the reason why other companies that tried to address the stage and failed is because of quality issues—they treated the display data or video data in the same way that they treat generic data, using data modems. So they try to compress and put it in the data modem, leading to poor quality of video. Amimon is the first company that is really addressing the space with a video specific solution—with a video modem—and that enables us to solve this problem. 

How do you look at Amimon’s role in this new technology?

The company is a semiconductor component provider. We are planning to provide components to TV, projector and set-top box manufacturers, to enable wireless connectivity between sources and displays. And, because we want to enable the standard, kind of make it successful and make it a widespread standard, we are also into being a contributor; we will also license and enable other companies to also supply and compete with us, to provide multi-vendor standards. 

How did the company address issues regarding interference as well as network security?

The WHDI, our technology, operates in the 5GHz unlicensed band. We occupy one channel, the 20MHz, in the 5GHz unlicensed band, and that enables us to deliver uncompressed 720p and 1080i. We share the spectrum with other transmitters in that spectrum, not just 802.11n, and the way we deal with this is by basically selecting different channels. We coexist by operating a separate channel, and the good news is that there are a lot of channels available in that frequency space, allowing many applications to be supported.  

As for network security, we are working with partners to make sure that the security of our system is at the highest level available. Inside our solution is an encryption engine using a 256-bit AES encryption—one of the strongest encryption available today in the market. So I can say our solution is very secure. HDMI is a high-quality and secure interface, which is why it has been so successful. We are already offering to the wireless world a lot of the benefits or the same benefits that HDMI offers to the wired world, in terms of quality and security. 

How do you see the WHDI technology pick up this year?

I am very optimistic. We are providing semiconductor components in the second quarter of this year to our customers. In the last CES in Las Vegas, Sanyo presented a prototype project, which is based on our technology. Also, we demonstrated our solutions with other customers and partners, TV manufacturers from China. We announced a joint reference design with PixelWorks, a display processor company that provides solutions to projector manufacturers.

So overall, the traction is very strong; it has already been demonstrated by Sanyo, which is the leading brand in the projector space, and many other customers are already planning to follow and have a product within this year. By the end of 2007, we will start seeing wireless projectors and wireless accessories; and in 2008, we will start seeing more TV manufacturers providing wireless TVs. In parallel, we will be doing standardization efforts; that will be down over the course of 2008. 

Does the company have expansion plans in Asia? Please provide us some details.

Yes. Currently we are working in Asia. We have several people working for us in Japan; we are also in the process of expanding our presence in South Korea and Taiwan. Over the next year, I believe we’ll start having support offices in Japan, South Korea and possibly other parts of Asia. 

What can you say are the biggest challenge today as regards the wireless video interface technology? 

The biggest challenge was to actually demonstrate what we said we can do a year ago, we can actually do. Delivering 1.5Gbps of video in a 20MHz channel is about 10 times or 15 times more than what anyone else can actually demonstrate at the time.

Now, we’ve met that challenge of actually demonstrating that we were able to do that. The biggest challenge for us right now is actually taking that and turning it into a widespread and widely deployed technology. So it is really a matter of executing and deploying WHDI in various products.