An Ignoble Experiment

2. Kumu raises $15M, plans field trial with U.S. carrier

TOKYO--Although 5G is currently more of a concept than reality, wireless technology leaders like Ericsson (NASDAQ:ERIC) Senior Vice President and CTO Ulf Ewaldsson are already putting together their wish list for the next-gen technology. During an interview with FierceWirelessTech at the Ericsson Business Innovation Forum here, Ewaldsson painted a vision for 5G that he called "a network for a networked society."

Ewaldsson (Source: Ericsson)

Specifically, Ewaldsson said that 5G will help facilitate a world where everything is connected and network download speeds will likely be 20 Gigabits per second or greater. In addition, he said that network latency will have to be less than a millisecond to enable many of the mission-critical applications that are being envisioned today. "Machines will be communicating with each other and they don't need the spinning wheel," referring to the wheel-like icon that is displayed on a screen when the device is pinging the network.

Ewaldsson also said that he believes that today's 4G networks will evolve the point where every terminal on the network, for example, could actually operate like a base station. "Phones will become base stations," he said.

Like many vendors, Ericsson is anxious to put its stake in the ground regarding 5G. The company is part of METIS 2020, which stands for mobile and wireless communication enablers for the twenty-twenty information society. METIS 2020's goal is to "lay the foundation for 5G" and establish Europe as a leader in the technology.

Ericsson's 5G vision may sound familiar--the company isn't the only vendor pushing to make a name for itself in 5G. Nokia Solutions Networks earlier this year released its "Technology Vision 2020" which included six key elements for the 5G network of 2020. Those elements include: enabling 1,000 times more capacity; reducing latency to milliseconds; teaching networks to be self-aware; personalizing the network experience; reinventing telco for the cloud; and flattening total energy consumption.

Read more about: Ulf Ewaldsson, 5G
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By Tammy Parker

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3. SpiderCloud rolling out simultaneous 3G/LTE small cell

Silicon Valley startup Kumu Networks, which claims its self-interference solution can double network capacity, nailed down $15 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by Third Point Ventures. Also joining the round were previous investors New Enterprise Associates and Khosla Ventures, which participated in Kumu's $10 million in Series A funding round during December 2012.

Kumu said the additional funding will be used to further development of its technology, which it calls full duplex wireless, as well as to support major carrier trials. Sachin Katti, the company's CEO and an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford University, told Bloomberg that Kumu is planning field trials starting in 2014 with three operators, including one in the United States.

The 18-employee company also said its technology is being considered for use in 5G networks and high-efficiency Wi-Fi standards.

Katti indicated that Kumu would like to follow Qualcomm's (NASDAQ:QCOM) business model, by developing technology it can license to device and network equipment vendors, with late 2015 being the target date to begin booking revenues.

Joel Brand, Kumu's vice president of product management, told Venture Beat that the startup did not need to raise the Series B funding at this time but decided to anyway because "there was a lot of inbound interest from a lot of strategic partners." Kumu opted to raise money from financial investors instead of committing to a specific partner so it could maintain neutrality when it comes to future partnerships, he said.

For more:
- see this Kumu release
- see this Bloomberg article
- see this Venture Beat article

Special Report: Ericsson, Huawei and others delve into 5G via METIS 2020

By Tammy Parker

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4. UC Berkeley gesture recognition system targets wearable devices

SpiderCloud Wireless is using a Broadcom WCDMA/LTE baseband system on chip (SoC) to create a multimode small cell for the enterprise that can offer 3G and LTE services simultaneously.

SpiderCloud's new SCRN-310 small cell combines the Broadcom SoC with SpiderCloud's software and is software-upgradeable to operate in two LTE spectrum bands as mobile operators refarm their 3G spectrum for LTE services.

The SCRN-310 supports 32 WCDMA/HSPA+ channels, 32 active LTE users and 128 LTE connected users. It also carries Voice over LTE (VoLTE).

Slated for availability during 2014's second quarter, the SCRN-310 will initially be available in two versions: One will operate in Band Class 2 (1900 MHz) and Band Class 4 (AWS) while the second will operate in Band Class 1 (2100 MHz) and Band Class 7 (2600 MHz). Support for additional band classes is planned for the second half of 2014, SpiderCloud said.

The vendor announced one year ago that it would add LTE capability to its small cell enterprise radio access network (E-RAN) systems with the 2013 launch of its SCRN-210 LTE small cell.

"As mobile data usage migrates from 3G to LTE in the next five years, SCRN-310 provides mobile operators with the flexibility they need and protects their investment in small cells," said Amit Jain, vice president of product management for SpiderCloud Wireless. "Our partnership with Broadcom allows us to introduce the first flexible multi-access small cell to market."

Supporting both 3G and LTE access is critical for operator investment protection, said Peter Jarich, vice president of consumer and infrastructure with Current Analysis. "Mobile operators need flexibility as they migrate their networks indoors and seek to enable in-building small cell services to medium and large enterprise customers," he noted.

There is a growing market for femtocells and other small cell flavors that serve indoor locations, which should bode well for solutions such as SpiderCloud's. According to ABI Research the number of femtocell installations in the enterprise market has risen by 70 percent over the past year. The research firm predicts femtocell shipments will increase tenfold by 2018, jumping from 3.75 million in 2013 to 37.45 million.

Vendors seeking a share of the market are coming from different backgrounds including ICT, core network and in-building/DAS, ABI noted. One recently announced entry is Ericsson's (NASDAQ:ERIC) Radio Dot System, a miniature disk-shaped cellular radio, will be available commercially in late 2014.

For more:
- see this SpiderCloud release
- see this ABI release

Read more about: SCRN-310, femtocell
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By Tammy Parker

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5. Qualcomm acquires Arteris' NoC tech assets, team

University researchers are working on a tiny chip that could be used for gesture recognition on smart watches and headsets. Unlike devices that use light to recognize hand gestures, this new approach relies upon sound waves.

The ultrasonic gesture recognizer technology, called Chirp, is being developed by research engineers at the University of California at Berkeley's Swarm Lab and Sensor and Actuator Center. Their research has progressed far enough for them to form a spinoff company, called Chirp Microsystems, to develop and market the technology, according to MIT Technology Review.

According to the Swarm Lab's website, current optical 3D imagers for gesture recognition, such as Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Kinect, suffer from large size and high power consumption. Further, their performance depends on ambient illumination, and they generally cannot operate in sunlight.

"These factors have prevented widespread adoption of gesture interfaces in energy- and volume-limited environments such as tablets and smartphones," the lab said.

According to the lab, using sound rather than light can result in "chip-scale solution size, low power consumption, and ambient light insensitivity."

The lab said its research was inspired by medical ultrasound and is specifically focused on building "an ultrasonic 3D range sensor system suitable for gesture-recognition using batch-fabricated micro-machined aluminum nitride (AlN) ultrasonic transducer arrays and custom CMOS electronics."

Chirp relies upon two computer chips, an ultrasound chip and another custom chip that sends and receives electrical signals from the ultrasound chip. Similar to radar, by generating sound wave pulses and then listening for their echoes to return, the Chirp system can calculate how far away something is. Swarm's system also includes a watch battery that can run for 30 hours thanks to the system's low power consumption.

Chirp technology promises to be small enough for implantation into wearable gadgets such as smart watches and head-mounted computers such as Google Glass (NASDAQ:GOOG), which don't have enough room to accommodate useful touch screens.

"There aren't a whole lot of options of what you can do on a touch screen when it's about the size of a quarter or so," Richard Przybyla, a graduate student at the UC Berkeley Sensor & Actuator Center, who designed the ultrasound chip, told MIT Technology Review.

Przybyla said one goal is to determine a basic set of gesture commands that can be programmed into Chirp-enabled devices. For example, a user could move their hand away from the smartphone screen in order to zoom in on a photo. Researcher may graduate from tracking hand motions with Chirp to individual finger tracking, he said.

For more:
- see this Swarm Lab webpage
- see this MIT Technology Review article
- see this phys.org article

By Tammy Parker

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