VentureBeat

Silicon Valley chip company Amimon has released what it says is the first ever chip that serves high-definition uncompressed video wirelessly across the whole home.

That’s a bold claim, but could be true. The young Santa Clara, Calif. company’s chips stream HD video up to 150 feet, at an effective 250 to 800 megabits per second, which matches the capacity of the best of the numerous competing chip makers, many of them using Ultrawideband technology. (Amimon actually boasts that its chips offer video at 3 gigabits per second, but it is forced to strip out some of the video quality — see pdf — to operate within the regulated confines of the 5 gigahertz band, which is the same Wifi, thereby reducing that capacity significantly.)

The chip should spur on the HDTV revolution, allowing consumers to more easily equip their flat-panel TVs with wireless technology. The company’s founder Noam Geri writes about the constraints of the industry until now, and why uncompressed wireless video streaming is important

Many other young chip companies offering wireless video transmission are using UltrawideBand technology, which can transmit a robust 500 megabits of data a second — roughly 10 times today’s WiFi speeds.

Last year, Amimon raised $14 million in a second round of funding, and got another round from Motorola earlier this year.

It follows a series of investments into other wireless broadband chip companies such as SiBeam, Artimi, TZero, Airgo and Ruckus.

SiBeam says it can transmit at 4 gigabits per seconds, using the 60GHz technology using standard (super fast). However, it doesn’t extend 150 feet. It reaches 10 meters, and says it has limited its range to that because Hollywood content owners fear that anything greater could subject it to hacking or access by others.

Artimi, a company making ultra-wideband technology, which lets you speed up the transfer of video or other files by more than 100 times, has raised more money to help it deliver on that promise.

The Santa Clara, Calif. company has raised $5 million from Khosla Ventures, to be announced tomorrow (Wednesday), and plans to ship its product this year.

At first, Artimi chips will be available via a plug-in device for wireless USB. You plug in a device to your phone or camera, and you can transfer videos or other data to your PC at rates at least as a hundred times fast as you can with the fastest cellular networks, such as EVDO. It will also save you power. By next year, Artimi hopes to have its chip embedded in digital cameras and camcorders, and by 2009, in phones, so that you don’t need any hardware. Among Artimi’s competitors are Alereon and Wisair.

With camera phones getting more sophisticated, people are taking pictures with higher resolution, and eventually they’ll be taking multi-gigabyte-sized movies. But at that size, they’re getting near impossible to transfer from phones, said Dave Weiden, partner at Khosla Venture. Some cameras are running out of batteries during transfer.

Artimi supports both Wireless USB and next-generation Bluetooth.

The funding brings Artimi’s total backing to $50 million. Artimi’s other investors include Accel Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Oak Investment Partners, and Bank of Scotland Growth Equity.