Patrick Norton reports that Sony has opted to play both sides of the ultra-wideband fence. Pat is saying that Sony is going to be bringing about their very own UWB (ultra-wideband) chip here very soon. Unfortunately, this appears to have caused some clashes among the chip crowd from what I am hearing.

Props to Unstrung for tracking down a juicy link to a NE Asia Online’s story on Sony’s ultra-wideband (UWB) efforts.

Apparently the consumer electronics giant plans to demonstrate its own UWB chip at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in February, 2005.

What makes that so juicy? The chip, which NE Asia Online believes was co-developed with Mixed Signal Systems Inc. employs direct sequence spread spectrum UWB.

That puts the Sony processor at odds with Sony being a high profile member of the MultiBand OFDM Alliance (MBOA). The MBOA is currently deadlocked in its battle with Freescale Semiconductor over the IEEE spec for UWB. Freescales is pro DSS.

It should be interesting to see if Sony ends up delivering both MBOA and DSS UWB products.

The Sony tidbit is in Unstrung’s Ultrawideband Preps for CES. The article pulls together a heap of UWB announcements that have been floating around from various silicon makers, and includes a reminder that the MBOA Ultra Wideband camp will be exhibiting in the Innovations Plus area at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show.