Time Domain spins out UWB venture

Time Domain spins out UWB venture
Manhasset, N.Y. - Longtime ultrawideband proponent Time Domain Corp. is spinning off its comms group to develop chips for high-data-rate communications. ICs from the new venture, Alereon Inc., will be designed to meet IEEE's 802.15.3a standard when those specs are finalized. Time Domain will return to its initial focus on tracking, radar and other contracts using low-rate communications for the military and government.

The new company will be based in Austin, Texas, and will draw staff from Time Domain's Huntsville, Ala., headquarters. Eric Broockman, Alereon's chief executive officer, said the spin-off stems from Time Domain's reluctance to continue funding development of 802.15.3a-compliant silicon while simultaneously meeting the obligations of its military and government contracts.

Broockman said Alereon will take Time Domain's P300 high-data-rate ultrawideband technology, and 26 of the employees who worked on it, and continue the chip development as an independent spin-off funded by Austin Ventures and Pharos Capital. The amount of seed financing has not yet been announced.

Twenty of the new Alereon employees will move to Austin. All are from Time Domain's engineering department, except for Alereon's vice president, Jeff Ross; chief operating officer, Jim Baker; and vice president of business development, Jim Myer. Baker will also be Alereon's chief technology officer, Broockman said. Larry Fullerton, Time Domain's founder and chief scientist, will stay with Time Domain.

Ralph Petroff, Time Domain's president and CEO, told EE Times in April that he intended to step down and seek a successor (see www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030424S0046). Broockman said Time Domain will continue to hold a stake in Alereon but he refused to provide details.

The P300 technology developed at Time Domain was the foundation of the company's original proposal to the IEEE 802.15.3a standards-setting group in February, said Broockman. The company then joined the Intel Corp.-led Multiband Coalition in promoting a multiband approach to ultrawideband that the coalition said would provide the scalability needed for CMOS as well as the flexibility necessary to meet global regulatory requirements.

In July, the 15-company coalition merged its proposal with Texas Instruments Inc.'s orthogonal frequency-division multiplex approach to form the Multiband-OFDM Alliance (July 21, page 1).

The Multiband-OFDM Alliance proposal came to the fore at a July meeting of the IEEE 802.15.3a group, where it faced competing proposals, including one from XtremeSpectrum Inc., Motorola Inc. and ParthusCeva Inc. Questions were raised about the feasibility of the alliance's proposal under Federal Communications Commission rules. But Alereon vice president Ross said the alliance met recently with the FCC and expects to have the issues resolved before the next meeting of the .15.3a group in Singapore in September. In the meantime, he said, Alereon will continue its plan to develop a full end-to-end physical- and media-access-control-layer design leveraging its work on the P300.

Alereon decided to locate its headquarters in Austin, Broockman said, to leverage the wealth of available talent in the area, which is home to wireless and mixed-signal design programs at the University of Texas.

"It's the second largest hub of chip designers in the U.S., so it's fertile ground from which to recruit," he said.

Broockman also cited the algorithm, logic, baseband and RF talent in-house at Alereon, and said the company was looking to expand its digital, analog and embedded-software teams. To that end, the company has hired San Diego-based consultant Bob Short as chief engineer. "As we get closer to first product, we'll add sales and marketing," Broockman said.

Broockman declined to specify a product-development schedule, saying only that he expects to start demonstrations next year, with first products by the third quarter.

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