Posted: 12th May, 2004 By: MarkJ
US based Pulse~LINK claims to have developed a new UltraWideBand (UWB) chipset capable of delivering up to 1Gbps speeds over wireless and cable networks:
The US company said that it has received first test silicon for the design, with production scheduled for mid-2005, and that it is intended to cope with any radio standard currently in use. "We'll be able to do anything from DC to 6GHz," company president and COO Bruce Watkins told ZDNet UK. "We can use any of the proposed wireless ultrawideband (UWB) standards, at the same time as adding UWB-based access to cable and mains electricity systems."
The company has previously demonstrated both these novel applications of UWB, and plans to deploy its design initially in conjunction with existing service providers. In theory this would allow a cable operator to provide customers with a cable box delivering ultrafast broadband while simultaneously providing local wireless connectivity to the rest of the home.
Unusually, the design is completely reprogrammable and is one of the first mainstream software-defined cognitive radios -- a general purpose radio processor. "We anticipate future evolutions implemented on this same chip to be able to support and deliver narrowband carrier signals such as Wi-Fi, WiMax, or any flavour of IEEE 802.15.3a wireless UWB standard as well," said John Santhoff, chief technical officer. "Because it is driven by software, such evolution will not require any modifications to the chipset's hardware architecture and will purely be a matter of software or firmware upgrades."Now that's fast, more @
ZDNet.