History

From its creation in 1992 to its restructuring in 2006, Wi-LAN developed, manufactured and sold WiMAX products creating numerous cornerstone technologies for the general wireless industry. As part of supporting industry growth, Wi-LAN became a charter member of the WiMAX Forum, and chair company of the OFDM Forum. In 2002, Wi-LAN started working with WiMAX Forum members Nokia and Ensemble to define the next generation broadband wireless standard. This ultimately led to the creation of both 802.16 and the WiMAX standards: in fact, our patented W-OFDM technology lies at the core of the WiMAX standard.

Wi-LAN was also active in IEEE 802.16 and ETSI HiperMAN development, helping to ensure that the WiMAX standard is internationally accepted as the best broadband wireless technology.

In 2006, Wi-LAN transitioned its business to focus solely on its greatest asset, the patent portfolio. The key technologies found in the patent portfolio apply to diverse areas of wireless and wireline communications, and have been incorporated into standards by many telecommunications organizations.

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) Standards

In 1999, several industry leaders came together to form a global, non-profit organization, now known as the Wi-Fi Alliance, with the goal of driving the adoption of a single worldwide standard for high-speed wireless local area networking. The Wi-Fi Alliance develops universal specifications and follows through with rigorous testing and certification of Wi-Fi wireless devices, based on technical standards developed by the IEEE 802.11 Working Group.

The 802.11 focus is on Media Access Control (MAC) and Physical Layer (PHY) definition, with task groups under the main working group developing such standards as 802.11a (OFDM-based PHY), 802.11b (DSSS-based PHY), 802.11g (hybrid OFDM/DSSS-based PHY), and 802.11n (MIMO overlay on hybrid OFDM/DSSS-based PHY).

The 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, and 802.11n standards all use Wi-LAN's patented W-OFDM technology and/or Wi-LAN's patented MC-DSSS technology.

Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) Standards

The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) was founded in 1998. It is composed of members who drive the development of Bluetooth wireless technology and implement and market the technology in their products varying from mobile phones to printers.

The WiMedia Alliance was formed in 2002 to promote and enable the rapid adoption and standardization of UltraWideBand (UWB) worldwide for high-speed wireless, multimedia-capable personal-area connectivity in the PC, CE and mobile market segments. WiMedia adopted the MultiBand (MB) OFDM PHY, originally proposed within the IEEE 802.15.3a Task Group, as their PHY technical specification.

WiMedia UWB has been selected by the Bluetooth SIG (Bluetooth v3.0) and the USB Implementers Forum (Wireless USB 1.0) as the foundation radio of their high-speed wireless specifications for use in next-generation consumer electronics, mobile and computer applications.

The standards “Wireless USB 1.0”, “Bluetooth v3.0”, and 802.15.3a all use Wi-LAN's patented W-OFDM technology.

Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks (WMAN) Standards

The WiMAX Forum was established in 2001 as an industry association to coordinate testing and ensure the certification of interoperability of WiMAX equipment to the standards of IEEE 802.16, ETSI HiperMAN and Wireless Broadband (WiBro).

WiBro is a technology developed by the Korean telecom industry, based on IEEE 802.16, to fit the stringent spectrum use and equipment design restrictions within Korea.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) developed the HiperMAN specification to be compatible and interoperable with the IEEE 802.16 standard.

The IEEE 802.16 Working Group develops standards and recommended practices to support the development and deployment of broadband Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks.

The 802.16 focus is on MAC and PHY definitions, with task groups under the main working group developing such standards as 802.16d (fixed MAC and PHY), 802.16e (mobility capable MAC and PHY).

Both the MAC and PHY portions of the standards, WiBro, 802.16d, and 802.16e use Wi-LAN’s patented MAC technology and W-OFDM technology.

Cellular Standards based on GSM

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) was established in 1998, with a mandate to produce globally applicable Technical Specifications and Technical Reports for a 3rd generation mobile system based on evolved GSM core networks and the radio access technologies that they support. Wideband CMDA (WCDMA) was developed as the baseline standard, with an evolution path to High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA).

The WCDMA and HSDPA standards both use Wi-LAN's patented MC-DSSS technology.

Cellular Standards based on CDMA

The 3rd Generation Partnership Project 2 (3GPP2) was established in 1998, with a mandate to produce global specifications, comprising North American and Asian interests, for network evolution of 3rd generation systems based on ANSI/TIA/EIA-41 and Radio Transmission Technologies (RTT) supported by ANSI/TIA/EIA-41. CDMA2000 1X, based on cdmaOne, was developed as the baseline standard, with an evolution path to 1X EV-DO Rev.x

The cdmaOne, CDMA2000 and EV-DO standards, in all their revisions, use Wi-LAN's patented MC-DSSS technology.

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) Standards

The DSL Forum was created in 1994 to develop and promote DSL technologies, which provide high-speed data communications over the twisted-pair of wires used to provide local telephone services. Standardization of the DSL technologies happened originally through the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), which published the first DSL standard in 1998 under ANSI T1.413 Issue 2, also known as Asymmetric DSL (ADSL). In 1999, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) standardized ADSL under Recommendation G.992.1, and further introduced a lower-rate splitterless version of ADSL under Recommendation G.992.2 (also known as ADSL lite).

The ITU has been introducing higher-speed versions of DSL since then, such as VDSL (G.993.1) in 2001, ADSL2 (G.992.3/4) in 2002, ADSL2+ (G.992.5) in 2003 and VDSL2 (G.993.2) in 2006.

DOCSIS Standards

The Cable Television Laboratories (CableLabs) is a non-profit organization founded in 1988 by members of the cable television industry to develop and promote to cable communication technologies. With the help of contributing companies, CableLabs published a first specification for cable modems called Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification (DOCSIS) in 1997. Higher uplink speeds and QoS support were introduced in the second publication of the specification (DOCSIS 2.0) in 2001. Higher uplink and downlink speeds, as well as support for IPv6, led to the publication of DOCSIS 3.0 in 2006. An European version of the DOCSIS specification, known as EuroDOCSIS, has also been developed to meet the requirements of the European cable industry. Testing and certification of DOCSIS equipment is performed by CableLabs, while testing and certification of EuroDOCSIS equipment is performed by Excentis.

The ITU has adopted DOCSIS 1.1 as its Recommendation J.112 in 1998, and DOCSIS 2.0 as Recommendation J.122 in 2002. The ITU Recommendations also include EuroDOCSIS and a Japanese variant of DOCSIS.

V-chip Standards

The V-chip is a standard for the advanced monitoring system in the consumer electronics or cable industry. The V-chip technology combines hardware and software to block programming by rating code and content categories, as regulated by the Federal Communications Commission in the United States and the Canadian Radio Television Commission (CRTC) in Canada. This selective blocking capability positions the V-chip above any other blocking technology available and applies to digital televisions, set-top boxes and other equipment.

Future

W-OFDM and MC-DSSS modulation techniques form the basis of all modern high speed digital modems. Wi-LAN continues to support the growth of the telecommunications industry in terms of wireless spectrum allocation and technology development, including in the following areas:

• Bluetooth
• 60 GHz
• Wibree
• Cognitive Radio
• RFID
• DSL