Pulse-Link, the UWB (ultra-wide band) fabless semiconductor start-up, is shipping its first products.

"We have just started shipping, we got our first PO (purchase order) in December, and I got another one through today (Monday)", Bruce Watkins, co-founder, president and COO of Pulse-Link told Electronics Weekly at the Globalpress Summit Conference in San Francisco this week.

"At the present point in time it's a few thousand here, and a few thousand there, but we expect to hit the tens of thousands this summer and, with optimism, things should keep up from there", added Watkins.

Giving him cause for optimism is a strong take up for Pulse-Link's four reference designs. "We used to have evaluation kits for C-Wave (Pulse-Link's technology) more recently, instead of that, we've produced reference designs optimised for specific functions", said Watkins.

The four functions are: wireless HDMI; HDMI over co-ax; bridging Ethernet over co-ax; and 1394 over co-ax.

"Since CES (in January) we've sold 80 reference designs", said Watkins, "I have 70 more in inventory band I expect all 70 of those will go in the next 30 days."

The interest may be because Pulse-Link has the fastest UWB technology in the industry with a PHY rate of 1.35Gbits/sec and a true application layer throughput of 890Mbits/sec.

Although top rate HDMI is 10.2Gbits/sec, Pulse-Link uses JPEG2000 as used in digital cinema which has a compression ration of 8/9:1 and is "mathematically and visually loss-less", according to Watkins.

Although JPEG2000 doesn't bring down 10.2Gbit/sec HDMI to fit a 890Mbits/sec throughput, there very few occasions when the full 10.2 Gbits/sec is used, and most HDMI is transmitted at 100Mbits/sec and, even with inter-active features added, at not much more than 400Mbits/sec. So the Pulse-Link technology can handle most HDMI applications.

"We could double the data rate, but no one wants that", said Watkins.