Motorola buys Ultrawideband chip firm

Motorola late yesterday said it acquired Ultrawideband (UWB) chip maker XtremeSpectrum for an undisclosed sum. Motorola is a supporter of XtremeSpectrum's version of UWB technology, which XtremeSpectrum is currently pushing for approval with the IEEE. The company's only competition in terms of a viable UWB standard is the MultiBand OFDM Alliance, a group of 34 technology giants including Nokia and Texas Instruments. The alliance's proposal recently won a majority of the votes cast during an IEEE UWB task group meeting. The vote, however, failed to reach the 75 percent approval needed to win, meaning that XtremeSpectrum's version of UWB is still in the running (though it is something of a long shot at this stage in the process). Motorola said that XtremeSpectrum's chips are the fist UWB silicon products to ship to equipment makers. This will hardly matter, though, if the IEEE ratifies and endorses the company's rival UWB standard. Motorola recently agreed to spin off its chip business, making this acquisition hard to place in terms of Motorola's current market strategy. Researcher ABI predicts that the market for UWB products will be worth $1.7 billion by 2007.

Source: CNET