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.
