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Wireless LAN library gains ultrawideband support

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 3, 2003

CoWare has added ultrawideband (UWB) technology to its Signal Processing Worksystem (SPW) wireless LAN library.

CoWare has added ultrawideband (UWB) technology to its Signal Processing Worksystem (SPW) wireless LAN library.

The company is the first in the industry to announce library support for technology being considered for the emerging UWB standard.

UWB is a revolutionary technology for the design of wireless networking products.

"UWB has a tremendous amount of potential in terms of throughput, low power, and low cost, compared to other wireless technologies", said Gemma Paulo, Senior Networks Analyst, In-Stat/MDR.

"With many companies awaiting a conclusion in the IEEE802.15.3a standard before shipping products based on the technology, we are pleased to see CoWare enabling mainstream designers to create UWB designs.

This can help proliferate the technology and products based on it".

Two proposals are under consideration for the standard of implementing UWB in short-range wireless personal area networks.

The CoWare SPW wireless LAN library now supports orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) technology.

If the competing proposal for direct sequence code division multiple access (DSCDMA) technology is accepted, CoWare will expand its WLAN library to support it as well.

"We are committed to supporting the technology that will help our customers design products based on UWB technology", said Isaac Sundarajan, Vice President and General Manager of the CoWare SPW business unit.

"We are offering OFDM technology as a starting point and we are also ready to add the DSCDMA technology so customers can begin to work with UWB.

CoWare continuously updates its libraries to help our customers leverage the most current information available for communications and multimedia standards".

CoWare SPW is a complete platform for design and verification of DSP algorithms.

Its up-to-date communications and multimedia libraries are accessible through a hierarchical block diagram approach, based on more than 3500 building blocks.

The WLAN library includes end-to-end system models of WLAN standards including WiFi compliance, as well as an executable version of the standards.

Using the library, system and design engineers can rapidly create an accurate model of the system, incorporate their differentiating pieces, and then simulate the system under different scenarios to optimise the system architecture.

According to Siavash Alamouti, Director of Systems Engineering at Vivato: "CoWare's SPW libraries are the industry's most comprehensive offering of design libraries for wireless and wired communication systems.

We are excited that CoWare is now offering UWB support through their WLAN library - which we own.

This library enables us to simulate coexistence issues between WiFi and UWB incumbents quickly and easily.

Also, in the short term, it will be a very useful platform for the standard bodies to objectively compare the different UWB proposals, and in the long-term to accelerate the realisation of the standard".

The next release of the CoWare wireless LAN library with support for UWB OFDM technology is slated to ship worldwide in December 2003.

The initial UWB reference model will be available to valid SPW WLAN users as part of their maintenance update.

New customers can take advantage of short-term promotional pricing starting at Eur 10,000 for an annual subscription licence.