The world’s largest annual tradeshow for consumer technology, Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is now under way at Las Vegas from 7-10 Jan. This year CES is truly phenomenal with many innovative products line up. Some of the highlights I captured from the internet are:

• Bill Gate Farewell - Bill Gate delivered his farewell speech at the CES. During the speech, he showcasted a very funny self-deprecating video of his last few days in Microsoft. Watch the funny video below.
• Blu-ray - Sony announced the release of a blu-ray player for the PC. The BDU-X10S is a sub $200 player that will allow you to play back Blu-ray movies on your PC (Ref). Yesterday, Blu-ray made the headlines by winning the format war against rival format HD-DVD after Warner Bros announced that it would use exclusively Blu-ray starting from June (Ref).
• 45nm chips - Intel unveiled 16 products, including the company’s first 45nm processors for Intel Centrino based notebooks. Among the 16 new products, 12 are designed for new notebook and desktop products and four are for servers. (Ref).
• New laptop graphics - AMD introduced the new ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 series, with the series as a whole optimized for the forthcoming AMD notebook platform, code-named “Puma.” The chips also allow notebook users to play the Blu-ray and HD-DVD movies in full-HD 1080p resolution(Ref)
• Digital Freedom - HP expanded its MediaSmart connected entertainment portfolio with the new HP MediaSmart Receiver, which allows consumers to stream movies, music and photos from any networked PC or device in the home to any high-definition HDTV (Ref).

The 3-day (24-26 Sep) 2007 IEEE Conference of Ultra Wideband (ICUWB), held for the first time in Singapore, has just concluded successfully. The conference ushers Singapore into the UWB era. In conjunction to the conference, the Singapore Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) announced that it would allotted the 3,400- to 10,600-MHz spectrum bands and set an emissions cap of -70 dBm/MHz for most UWB applications. Any devices complying with the technical and emission standards would be exempt from licensing requirements (Ref). This move would likely spur the early adoption and commercialization of UWB applications in Singapore. According to market analyst IMS Research, UWB is forecast to penetrate the market in low volume in 2007 and rise to a penetration rate of around 20% by 2011. By 2010, more than 120 million phones will be equipped with UWB. Why? because UWB is superior in high-speed data transmission for multimedia applications to mobile phones. It consumes very low power compared to other wireless technologies. It is the most promising techniques for short-range, high data rate wireless applications such as wireless USB, audio/video streaming, and cable replacement.

The Singapore Institute of Microelectronics (IME) has been very active in UWB R&D for the last couple of years. The IME researchers are also amongst the world’s first to develop a CMOS dual-band UWB transceiver which supports both the 3-5 GHz and the 6-10 GHz (Ref). I believe the proliferation of UWB commercialization will also drive the local RFIC research since RFIC is the enabling technology for UWB. Below is the video clip on UWB in CES 2007.