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networkZONE Products for the week of January 5, 2009
Quantenna Communications Says…
Partnership with W&W Communications Enables Consumer Electronics Manufacturers to Offer Super Low Latency Full-HD Wireless Video over 802.11n Networks
Partnership will help accelerate the widespread adoption of standard Wi-Fi for video distribution in the home by combining the highest performance 4 x 4 MIMO 802.11n and super low latency H.264 video codecs
Quantenna Communications, Inc. has announced a partnership with W&W Communications, Inc., the leader in super low latency, full-HD H.264 video codecs, to deliver high definition television (HDTV) over plug-and-play standards-based WiFi networks. The combination of 802.11n WiFi and H.264 will allow consumer electronics manufacturers to develop products that enable standard home wireless networks to deliver multiple, simultaneous and interference-free HD-quality video streams throughout the entire home, eliminating the need for propriety short-range wireless HD video solutions.
Consumer electronics vendors are seeking standards-based 802.11n intelligent high-speed wireless solutions that can provide ultra reliability, predictable bandwidth and unprecedented high speed performance for real-time video distribution and next-generation gaming, multimedia and HD entertainment in the home. Today, only proprietary wireless solutions can deliver error-free HD-quality video streams throughout the home because of the extreme bandwidth requirements and numerous interference and performance limitations inside homes.
By combining ultra reliable, high bandwidth standards-based 802.11n solutions with super low latency H.264 codec technology, consumer electronics manufactures now have a way to provide predictable bandwidth with imperceptible latency for flawless high-quality video without artifacts and degradation. This unique combination of technologies will enable consumer electronics manufacturers to build solutions that will fuel the adoption of standard WiFi to deliver interoperable, reliable and real-time high quality HD video simultaneously to HDTV displays anywhere, in any size home.
To meet manufacturers’ needs, Quantenna is blending its high performance 4x4 MIMO 802.11n solution – which features transmit beamforming, vector mesh routing and up to 600 Mbits/s data throughput – with W&W Communications’ super low latency H.264 video codecs that provide unmatched level of video compression at the sub 10 millisecond latency range. With this combination of technologies, Quantenna is able to provide significant reliability, coverage and performance advantages to deliver many simultaneous and error-free HD-quality video streams throughout the entire home over competitive proprietary solutions.
Quantenna and W&W Communications are developing a complete reference design to ensure that Quantenna’s QHS series of chipsets are compatible with W&W Communications Super Low Latency (SLL) Technology and standards-compliant H.264 codec technology, which is designed specifically for use by top-tier consumer electronics manufacturers.
“Pairing W&W Communications’ industry-leading super low latency, full-HD H.264 video codecs with our QHS series of ultra reliable and high performance chipsets offers our customers a complete, standards-based solution for delivering multiple and simultaneous wireless HD video streams within any home, anywhere,” said Dr. Behrooz Rezvani, Quantenna’s founder and CEO. “W&W Communications is gaining tremendous momentum among the foremost consumer electronic vendors. We view this partnership as a tremendous opportunity to help accelerate the widespread adoption of standard WiFifor video distribution in the home, making it the clear choice over proprietary wireless HD solutions on the market today.”
“Quantenna’s integration of our super low latency H.264 video codecs supports our commitment to providing the best-in-class wireless HD video experience for consumers,” said Lars Herlitz, CEO at W&W Communications. “By bundling these technologies, we are providing device manufacturers with a total video-over-WiFi solution that will enable superior, interference-free HD-quality video streams in their next-generation of products. The combined solution from W&W Communications and Quantenna clearly offers the most beneficial and most complete standards-based wireless HD solutions available today.”
EN-Genius Says…
It’s been a bit slow on the networking front around the holiday season, so I was really pleased to see Quantenna’s new offering for Wi-Fi-based HD video transport. Although it’s just a pairing of two existing chips, it is one of the more practical interim solutions to the rather formidable challenges involved with getting a reliable wireless HD video link to work across anything more than a large living room. It also gives me a chance to briefly highlight W&W Communications’ (recently acquired by Cavium) WW602 super-low-latency H.264 codec which forms the other half of the chip set. According to Quantenna, it took only 15 minutes to get the two chips working together on their first test lash-up and they report excellent video performance at 50 feet or more. Quantenna speculates that once they get more experience with the two chips, they may be able to get them to support a pair of BluRay-type video streams if both panels are within 20 - 30 ft of the set top box.
The WW602 codec specs are impressive, with the ability to support trans-sizing, trans-rating and stream duplication. It also boasts a content-adaptive noise reduction scheme and a full arsenal of error resiliency and concealment capabilities that should keep the damage created by occasional data errors to a minimum. Video data are handled by a pair of bidirectional ITU-R BT.1120 video ports. The codec’s host bus interface can be configured as either a standard PCI or a generic host bus.
The wireless link is handled by Quantenna’s high-performance 4 x 4 MIMO Wi-Fi device (reviewed here November 2008) which can reliably feed 50 - 60 Mbit/s worth of video data into W&W’s WW602 codec. As the review notes, it is a multi-chip module built with LTCC packaging to integrate lots of passive elements that help boost performance and cut its external passive count. Using a higher data rate reduces the amount of processing it takes to decompress a full HD data stream from H.264 packets, allowing the WW602 to do its job in 10 m or less (even when processing 1080P). Of course this average data rate means that the wireless link must actually support burst rates as high as 70 - 80 Mbit/s: rates that are well within the capabilities of a high-performance 802.11n 4 x 4 MIMO system.
Quantenna says it can support these speeds while still maintaining the 10 to 15 dB SNR and noise margins it will take to cope with the interference and channel degradation you’d expect in real-world applications. This appears to be much better than what early versions of 60 GHz 802.11vht technologies or the WHDI consortium’s proprietary solution are capable of. Both these technologies should eventually deliver the performance and range that a 4 x 4 MIMO Wi-Fi system can but if Quantenna and W&W can maintain an aggressive enough cost reduction program they may be too well-entrenched to be displaced. It’s tough to say whether a two-package solution like this will be continue to be cost-competitive in a year or two, or if Quantenna will have to find some way to shoehorn H.264 capabilities into its LTCC module but, for the moment, it’s a match made in heaven.
Quantenna is sampling its QHS family of Wi-Fi chip sets to top-tier customers in both the retail and carrier markets with high volume production anticipated in by mid 2009 when high volume pricing is anticipated to be under $20.
Product Page QHS
Product Page WW602
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