An end to cable clutter? IBM to unveil new wireless standard It's able to handle even HDTV signals.

By JOHN MARKOFF,

A team of IBM researchers plans to report tomorrow that they have used standard chip making materials to develop a high-speed wireless technology that could do away with the bulky cables that now connect electronic devices in the living room.

In the past, high-frequency wireless technology has generally required exotic semiconductor materials like gallium arsenide that are costly to work with and difficult to miniaturize.

At an annual semiconductor industry design meeting to begin here tomorrow, the researchers are expected to describe a design that is capable of transmitting more than 10 times the data of today's Wi-Fi using lower-cost silicon germanium material.

The researchers said the new technology would be ideal for moving HDTV video signals around the home wirelessly in the unlicensed 60-gigahertz portion of the radio frequency spectrum.

This is referred to as the "millimetre wave band," and it has long held out the promise of carrying far more data than other portions of the spectrum.

Moreover, because the high-frequency portion of the radio spectrum generally does not penetrate walls, it may be more palatable to Hollywood and the cable and DSL telecommunications firms, which have been concerned about the risks of piracy posed by some wireless technologies, said Richard Doherty, a computer industry consultant at Envisioneering Inc., based in Seaford, N.Y.

"It might appease Hollywood, but Monster Cable would lose out,'' he said.

The use of silicon germanium is significant because it exploits standard equipment that is readily available in IBM chip-making plants, according to Modest Oprysko, a manager in communication technology at IBM's Yorktown Heights research laboratories.

That means that there is potentially a relatively quick path from research to commercialization.

"This is Bluetooth on steroids," he said, referring to the current industry standard that has been used as a wireless cable replacement.

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