Freescale outlines path to 1G-bps UWB
Motorola Inc. subsidiary Freescale Semiconductor Inc. outlined a product roadmap on Monday that will take its line of UWB (Ultra-Wideband) chipsets from 114M bps (bits per second) to 1G bps over the next year.
Freescale 's existing XtremeSpectrum chipset can support short-range wireless UWB connections up to 114M bps. Samples of the chipset are available to hardware makers, and the chipset will be commercially available during the third quarter, the company said.
One of the first vendors to commit to using the chipset in its products is Taiwanese hardware maker Micro-Star International Co. Ltd (MSI). MSI plans to incorporate the chipset in a PCI card that will ship inside upcoming versions of its Mega PC home entertainment computers. The cards will also be available separately, a company executive said last week at the Computex 2004 exhibition in Taipei.
Freescale plans to begin shipping samples of its next UWB chipset with support for connections up to 220M bps during the fourth quarter, the company said. It will follow the introduction of that chipset with models that can support connections up to 480M bps and 1G bps within the next year, it said.
UWB is seen as an important upgrade for short-range wireless connections. Bluetooth supports data rates up to 1M bps and vendors 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 Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Microsoft Corp., NEC Corp. and Philips Semiconductor International BV.
The Wireless USB specification, which is based on another version of UWB, called MB-OFDM (Multiband Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing), will be finalized by the end of this year, according to Intel. The first version of Wireless USB is planned to support short-range connections up to 480M bps, it said.
IDG News Service
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