ISRAEL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY – "TECHNION", Haifa, ISRAEL - January 17, 2008 - The Israeli Short Range Communication Consortium ("ISRC") for High Data Rate Short Range Communications has concluded the first phase of its efforts with the demonstration of the technological building blocks that will form the basis for the next generation of short range, high bandwidth communications systems operating at over 100 Megabits per second (Mbps). Regarding the technological demonstrations, great success has been recorded in the application of the technology.

The ISRC is part of the "MAGNET" program – a Research and Development framework supported as part of the Office of the Chief Scientist of Israel’s Ministry of Industry, Trade, and Labor, that sponsors innovative generic industry-oriented technologies to strengthen the country's technological expertise and enhance competitiveness.

The Consortium is focusing on two promising technologies in the communications field: the continuation of the IEEE 802.11 standard, namely IEEE 802.11n, and Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology. Both technologies involve an increase by order of magnitude from today’s currently available wireless transmission technologies – enabling the speed and reliability of comparable wireline technologies.

Ilan Peled, MAGNET Director, said, "The MAGNET Committee, headed by Chief Scientist Dr. Eli Opper, views the ISRC as the technological innovation that could be crucial to the development of the next generation of communications. In the merit of breakthrough technologies such as these, Israel has an impressive presence in the global communications market."

The ISRC Consortium participants are looking into worldwide cooperation, especially within the European Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).

Technological Advantages and Applications
802.11n – Today, for a home multimedia application, the maximum throughput for an MPEG2 (movie) file requires bandwidth of 20Mbps. The new technology that the ISRC is developing, 802.11n, guarantees more bandwidth, improved reach and enhanced reliability. Applications that will benefit from this are: VoIP, video, music, gaming and data storage. The significance of this is that the transmission of large data files such as pre-recorded television shows from conventional recording devices to portable devices (laptops) will be significantly faster than they are today. For example, transmitting a 30-minute HD video segment using 802.11b technology takes 42 minutes, and using technology being developed by the Consortium, the same video segment could be transmitted in under one minute. Another example - transmission of several HD-quality video channels to multiple home or office access points simultaneously. So three HD broadcasts encoded in MPEG2 format could be transmitted to three separate plasma TV screens at the same time.

The technological advantage is also relevant to the workplace. Company networks will be able to transfer data at much higher speeds than they are able to today. Employees will be able to connect to their corporate networks with portable computers at very high speeds, to check their email, surf the Internet and work easily with large corporate files. Another component that enables the technology is the use of Multiple Input Multiple Output (MIMO) technology which improves radio reception through the use of multiple antennas. When radio waves bounce off walls, doors and other obstacles, the reception at the antenna causes wave destruction (known as "multipath"), and distorts part of the signal. Using MIMO, and "beamforming" it is possible to split the data stream into multiple parts, "spatial streams", and receive the signal across several antennas, thereby ensuring that the information will be transferred without being affected.

UWB – this technology enables products connected to the Digital Home to be upgraded with the rollout of short-range video communications systems for Search and Rescue as well as Disaster Zones and for controlling multimedia-enhanced industrial automation. UWB supplies high bandwidth communication at very low transmission power, which leads to the highest data rates being possible at the shortest ranges, to about 30 meters. Thanks to its very low transmission power, UWB coexists with all other wireless technologies that operate in the vicinity without causing any interference. Take a device that supports WiFI, for example. It will simply relate to the UWB signal as "noise" and filter it out. UWB uses a very low level of transmission power, 41dBm/Mhz, which according to United States FCC standard is appropriate for the human environment.

Sales forecasts for products based on new technologies such as those developed by the ISRC will reach approximately US$10 billion by 2011 (US$6.2 billion for MIMO-WLAN based products and US$3.8 billion for UWB-based products). About US$85 billion for all networks including network elements.

Bat-Sheva Ovadia, Chairperson of the ISRC Consortium and Executive Strategy Officer at Telematics Wireless, commented, "The Consortium member companies estimate the sales forecast for their products, based on technologies being developed within the framework of the Consortium, at more than US$3 billion during the years 2011-2015, where most of the technologies being developed by the Consortium are mainly hardware components."

According to Ovadia, until 2004, there were no residential wireless communications systems available for high speed file transfer, where WLAN systems were at a "net" maximum data rate of 30Mbps. Today, companies have the ability to transfer multimedia over UWB- and MIMO-based systems at the channel level, at very high throughput rates of up to 100 Mbps. If in the first phase, we worked at the communication channel level, the target for the next phase is a multi-user network system that can transfer multimedia over UWB and MIMO-based systems, which will reach very high data rates of over 100 Mbps. Ovadia further added that the success of the technological development has been greatly enhanced by the cooperation between the industry players – who define clear needs and implementable objectives according to market demands, and academic researchers who provide applicable research studies within the framework of the Consortium.

Ilan Peled added that the cooperation between academia and industry is expressed in such a way that both sides profit from it, through developing new and original concepts and deepening the relationship between the two areas.

CEVA is the world's leading licensor of DSP cores and applications, focusing on very high performance, low power consumption cores and subsystems, with a complete development environment. Its ISRC product is a DSP platform for WLAN and UWB.

About the ISRC
The Israeli Short Range Communication Consortium (ISRC) has been working for the last three years within the framework of the MAGNET Consortia Program of the Chief Scientist in the Israeli Ministry of Industry, Trade and Labor, which integrates joint initiatives between industry, including systems companies, infrastructure companies, start-up companies and academia. Members of the ISRC are the Technion, Tel Aviv University, Elbit, Tadiran Spectralink, Metalink, Wavion, Telematics Wireless, Tower Semiconductor, Pulsicom, CEVA, Hebrew University, Bar Ilan University and Ariel Academic College. So far, the Consortium have built various building blocks, which enable advanced capabilities within the field of high bandwidth, short range systems. The technology which is being developed within the framework of the Consortium, is intended to support a broad range of applications that operate within the consumer electronics and personal computer areas indoors as well as outdoors. The technology supports both data packet as well as streaming networks. For more information, please visit http://www.isrc.org.il.