Motorola subsidiary Freescale Semiconductor has outlined
a product roadmap that will take its line of ultra-wideband
chipsets from 114mbps to 1gbps over the next year.
Freescale 's existing XtremeSpectrum chipset can support
short-range wireless UWB connections up to 114mbps. Samples of the
chipset are available to hardware makers, and the chipset will be
available commercially during the third quarter.
One of the first suppliers to commit to using the chipset in its
products is Taiwanese hardware maker Micro-Star International,
which will incorporate the chipset in a PCI card that will ship
inside upcoming versions of its Mega PC home entertainment
computers.
Freescale will begin shipping samples of its next UWB chipset
with support for connections up to 220mbps during the fourth
quarter. It will follow the introduction of that chipset with
models that can support connections up to 480mbps and 1gbps within
the next year.
UWB is seen as an important upgrade for short-range wireless
connections. Bluetooth supports data rates up to 1mbps and
suppliers are looking for a technology that can support faster
connections so that large files, such as digital video, music and
digital pictures, can be quickly transferred between devices.
While Freescale looks set to be the first company to make a UWB
chipset commercially available, there is another UWB-based
technology that is under development with the backing of some of
the industry's biggest and most important players.
Freescale's UWB chipsets employ a version of the technology
called DS-UWB (Direct Sequence UWB). A different UWB-based
technology, called Wireless USB, is being developed by a group of
companies that include Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Samsung, Microsoft,
NEC and Philips.
The Wireless USB specification, which is based on another
version of UWB, called MB-OFDM (Multiband Orthogonal Frequency
Division Multiplexing), will be finalised by the end of this year,
according to Intel. The first version of Wireless USB will support
short-range connections up to 480mbps.
Sumner Lemon writes for IDG News
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