Ultra Wide Band

UWB is a wireless technology that transmits binary data—the 0s and 1s that are the digital building blocks of modern information systems. It uses low-energy and extremely short duration (in the order of pico seconds) impulses or bursts of RF (radio frequency) energy over a wide spectrum of frequencies, to transmit data over short to medium distances, say about 15—100 m. It doesn’t use carrier wave to transmit data.

UWB is fundamentally different from existing radio frequency technology. For radios today, picture a guy watering his lawn with a garden hose and moving the hose up and down in a smooth vertical motion. You can see a continuous stream of water in an undulating wave. Nearly all radios, cell phones, wireless LANs and so on are like that: a continuous signal that's overlaid with information by using one of several modulation techniques.

Now picture the same guy watering his lawn with a swiveling sprinkler that shoots many, fast, short pulses of water. That's typically what UWB is like: millions of very short, very fast, precisely timed bursts or pulses of energy, measured in nanoseconds and covering a very wide area. By varying the pulse timing according to a complex code, a pulse can represent either a zero or a one: the basis of digital communications.

Wireless technologies such as 802.11b and short-range Bluetooth radios eventually could be replaced by UWB products that would have a throughput capacity 1,000 times greater than 802.11b (11M bit/sec). Those numbers mean UWB systems have the potential to support many more users, at much higher speeds and lower costs, than current wireless LAN systems. Current UWB devices can transmit data up to 100 Mbps, compared to the 1 Mbps of Bluetooth and the 11 Mbps of 802.11b. Best of all, it costs a fraction of current technologies like Blue-tooth, WLANs and Wi-Fi.