ALEREON, A COMPANY based in Texas, was showing off some reference designs and proof of concepts that will be making their way into the consumer market over the next few months.
These devices promise to further ‘unwire’ our lives by allowing wireless USB 2.0 transmission rates. USB 2.0 is a fairly spritely 480Mbps, compared to 54 Mbps for current 802.11g wireless standards, and current 11g standards do not allow for automatic syncing and connection of devices.
Alereon is focussing on the device side, but has integrated the ability for each device to act as a mini-host for peer to peer communication. This addresses the proverbial ‘last mile’, bringing high speed wireless transmission into the home and also allowing the same technology to be taken down to any device with a USB port as device dongles become available.
This will allow for remote services such as NAS and printing on legacy devices. One question that remains to be answered is how the chip handles simultaneous requests from multiple hosts.
At the booth they had a demonstration of how the technology seamlessly integrates into exisiting technologies, dynamically switching between Bluetooth and UWB during a file transfer. When asked who was going to be introducing products based on the UWB standard, Alereon indicated that, in general, anyone who is currently building wireless routers is going to be introducing UWB products.
News source: theinquirer
