Here's a closer look at Schilling's work at Golden Bridge and Widax.
From the 1999 IEEE oral history.......
I left Interdigital at the end of 1994, and I basically took a year off. In 1996 I became chairman of Golden Bridge Technology, a company that wanted to get involved with the third generation standard for wireless to provide that higher quality. There the idea was to use the matched filter as a receiver while Interdigital and Qualcomm use correlator receivers.
To use a correlator receiver you really need a pilot signal to do it right. The idea at GBT was to use matched filters, which did not need the pilot signal, but which used a header, which was a little different philosophy. Each signal was preceded with a header, and so it was packet oriented because the matched filter detected a particular packet. This concept of packet orientation is extremely important for third generation and fourth generation technologies because it allows you to synchronize to each packet. This is a much more efficient operation and much more immune to the vagaries of Doppler and multipaths, etc.
I then worked with ATT and GBT, and formed the TIA Group 46.1, which was to standardize the Golden Bridge Technology in the TIA (Telecommunications Industry Association, a US standards body) for third generation use. We had a number of companies, including IDC, that agreed with our philosophy and they worked with us to develop the standard. Then we found that the Japanese standard body (called ARIB) and the European standard body (ETSI) also agreed with our design. Their design and our design were very similar. Our committee then decided to accept the ARIB and ETSI proposal, and we basically merged all of our standards into one and agreed to work together.
At that point, we were joined by T1P1, which is another US standards group. What got me very upset was when Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, decided that the 3G proposal being developed in TIA 45 was the U.S. proposed standard and that wide-band CDMA was a foreign proposed standard. She made that comment in the newspapers. It was totally wrong.
There were two U.S. proposed standards for CDMA, a narrow band standard that was being developed by Qualcomm, and a wide band standard -- TIA 46.1. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) has combined these two and other proposals together into a single, multi-mode, 3G standard. If I look at my role in 3G, I was one of the prime movers in using this matched filter based technology. Indeed, I have been preaching wide-band CDMA for commercial systems since 1985, when everyone was telling me that narrow band CDMA, Qualcomm’s system, was the way to go. Everyone is now working on wide-band CDMA, and it will be adopted. The idea of packet transmission, communications with packets is being adopted. I am very pleased that what I have been working at for most of my life it seems to becoming a reality. As a result of my work in wireless communication, I received the Armstrong Award by the IEEE Communications Society in 1998. I am very proud of that award because I am very proud of the work that I did.
And this is the technology he is working on at Widax.
The Technology
The WIDAX products employ the spread spectrum technique called direct sequence Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (W-CDMA) coupled with a technique called Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiple Access (OFDMA).
The W-CDMA technology allows simultaneous transmission of information over a common channel by assigning each of the signals a unique code during transmission.
The OFDMA technique spreads a single user over a wide bandwidth by breaking up the high-speed data into many low-speed packets and transmitting these low- speed packets over individual carriers.
Both methods are resilient to fading - the enemy of wireless transmission. Although these technologies have been known for several decades and have been used for military anti-jam communications, commercialization has only recently been possible with the advent of integrated digital high-speed custom components that lowered the size, cost, and power consumption dramatically.
Noting its former usage, it is not surprising that these communication methods are inherently private, as opposed to the current non-secure cellular radio schemes.
The occupied bandwidth and signal handling capability is higher than any other existing system, including the recently ETSI standardized 3G systems. For the reasons explained below, the performance of W-CDMA in combination with OFDMA in a wireless environment, is far superior to any existing modulation scheme.
In a wireless environment, a signal transmitted from one point to another arrives via many paths. When these multipath signals arrive at some received point, they all add and subtract with each other, resulting, at times, in deep "fades" where there is very little signal strength and the reception is completely disabled.
Figure 1 depicts the spectrum of both a wideband and narrowband (all Cellular systems) signal as they are transmitted. In Figure 2, it is seen how multipath affects the signals. Note how the narrowband cellular type signal is diminished considerably and only a small amount of energy remains, while only a very small portion of the wideband energy is lost.
The methodology employed in the WIDAX product design allows the proprietary OFDMA/W-CDMA engine circuits to be implemented using a low gate count and low power consumption, thereby yielding low cost products.
This next generation technology will replace all existing wireless data systems that have been developed to date, which are designed for low information rates, capable of carrying at most, full speed facsimile.
Using a series of one to six kilometer radius cells along with smart antenna technology, the resulting WIDAX network will deliver superior wireless performance and have the highest capacity, data rates, and quality than any other communications method. In addition, the system is inherently private and not subject to interception, as opposed to the current cellular radio scheme.
Note the reference to smart antenna technology and IDCC's recent investments in this area. Also, most of the top people at Widax appear to be the same folks who headed Golden Bridge.
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