Tech Giants Support Wireless HD Standard

Top consumer electronics manufacturers are backing a technology to send wireless signals from a single set-top box to multiple devices around the home or office.

Hitachi, Motorola, Samsung, Sharp and Sony, together with Amimon, have formed the Wireless Home Digital Interface SIG, designed to develop products based around Amimon's 5GHz wireless technology.

Amimon uses the same 5GHz unlicensed band of spectrum as 802.11a, although its WHDI technology uses its own protocols. The company claims that it can use two 20MHz channels to transmit 1080p video wirelessly 100 feet, through walls.

The technology has already been proven; Sharp began shipping an Amimon-based wireless HDTV in Japan earlier this year, about eight months after Amimon shipped its first product. Motorola took a stake in Amimon in 2007.

Last year, Sanyo demonstrated a wireless projector using the chip set, and three more OEMs demonstrated WHDI-based TVs: Loewe, XOCECO and Funai. The latter company serves as an ODM for top brands including Mitsubishi and Philips.

All of those TVs, however, will be using what Noam Geri, Amimon's vice president of marketing, calls "pre-standard" technology. In 2008, the SIG companies will agree on a standard, which will then be put into production next year, Geri said. There will be a logo that will be used to identify compatible components: "Without a connector, the logo will be the only way the consumer can tell that they will interoperate," Geri said.

Click here to read more on PCMag.com.