Long-awaited consolidation among global UWB (ultrawideband) standards took a big step forward today with the announcement that the WiMedia Alliance and Swiss-based standards development consortium Ecma International will collaborate on future UWB standards.

According to the plan, WiMedia will continue to play its current role of pre-standardization research, polling of member organisations, and post-standardisation certification and marketing activities. Ecma will work in parallel with the WiMedia Alliance on crafting the standards, then submit them to its own voting process. This two-track approach will produce standards that are genuinely global and that carry the ISO imprimatur, according to the organisations.

In the process, intellectual property from both WiMedia member organisations and Ecma member organisations will be bound to the standard, the organisations said. This should help to clarify global intellectual-property issues before a standard is ratified, rather than after manufacturers have begun to use it.

WiMedia was attracted to Ecma for its global reach, its access to the ISO certification, and its unique consensus-forming process, according to WiMedia sources. Ecma, which is in effect a standards-producing machine, claims to have an approval process that drives consensus without steamrolling the interests of smaller parties and, critically for a fast-moving technology such as UWB, that reaches a conclusion quickly, avoiding negotiating roadblocks.

Ecma has produced standards in such diverse areas as programming languages, near-field communications, data-file structures, and holographic systems.

By Ron Wilson, Executive Editor -- EDN, 7/22/2008