Ira Brodsky, president, Datacomm Research Company

"Multiple Input/Multiple Output (MIMO) is an area of intense development in the wireless industry because it delivers profound gains in range, throughput, and reliability," writes Ira Brodsky, president of Datacomm Research Company (DRC), in St. Louis, Missouri, in a "Research Alert" from DRC entitled MIMO Technology is Today's Most Significant Advance in Wireless Communications--but not all MIMO Claims are Accurate, published on February 8, 2005.

The main point of this paper is the importance of recognizing "true" MIMO as "the use of multiple, simultaneous signals (two or more radio waveforms) in a single frequency channel to exploit multipath propagation and thereby multiply spectral efficiency."

"Diversity and beamforming," Brodsky goes on to say, "are legitimate enhancements to conventional, one-dimensional wireless communications systems. But they are not MIMO—a method of communicating in two or more dimensions simultaneously."

In its premiere episode, MIMO World spoke with Ira Brodsky, who discussed in detail the points he makes in this "research alert" paper and elaborates on a number of issues relating to the emergence of what may turn out to be the latest "disruptive" wireless technology, MIMO.

You can listen to that conversation with Ira Brodsky, president of DRC, by clicking here.

In that interview, Mr. Brodsky talked about the competing MIMO-based systems now under consideration as the basis of the emerging 802.11n standard. Those two systems are the World-Wide Spectrum Efficiency (WWiSE) group, which counts among its members Airgo Networks, Broadcom, Buffalo, Conexant, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Hughes Network Systems, Ralink, Realtek, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments, TrellisWare Technologies, and Winbond Electronics Corp., and the TGn Sync group, which includes as its members Agere Systems Inc., Atheros Communications Inc., Cisco Systems, Inc., Intel Corporation, Marvell Semiconductor, Inc., Mitsubishi Electric Co., Nokia Corporation, Nortel Networks Corporation, Panasonic (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Ltd.), Qualcomm Inc., Royal Philips Electronics N.V., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., SANYO Electric Co. Ltd., Sharp Corporation, Sony Corporation, and Toshiba Corporation.

For a well-written introduction to MIMO, see Steven Cherry's commentary piece "Broader Broadband: Yet another flavor of Wi-Fi is coming, and it will be the fastest one yet" on the IEEE web site.

For a good discussion of the two different MIMO-based systems competing to form the basis of the emerging 802.11n standard, see "High Speed with MIMO: Who Cares?" by Eric Griffith.

Dr. Greg Raleigh is generally credited as the principal innovator behind MIMO. He's now the President and Chief Executive Officer of Airgo Networks.

Here's a press release from Netgear announcing that company's launch of a "108 Mbps Next Generation MIMO G Wireless Solution Powered by Airgo True MIMO Technology in Japan".

Learn more about Belkin's Wireless Pre-N Router, based on Airgo's True MIMO™ chipset.

MIMO is a type of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM).

A company called Orthogon Systems has created what it calls "intelligent OFDM" (iOFDM). Orthogon Systems "supplied the broadband wireless platforms for connecting video security equipment at the 55th U.S. Presidential Inauguration on January 20, 2005 in Washington D.C.