Product category:
Communications ICs (Wired)
News Release from: Freescale Semiconductor | Subject: XtremeSpectrum
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 10 June 2004
Ultrawideband chipsets ramp up towards
1Gbit/s
Freescale Semiconductor has detailed its current and next-generation UWB product family roadmap at the Wireless Connectivity (WiCon) World Expo in Amsterdam.
Freescale Semiconductor has detailed its current and next-generation UWB product family roadmap at the Wireless Connectivity (WiCon) World Expo in Amsterdam Over the next year, Freescale plans to deliver three advanced UWB product families, including the industry's first 1Gbit/s UWB solution, to address the wide variety of performance and functionality required by numerous UWB applications
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 9 Jun 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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Adding to the existing XtremeSpectrum chipset, which achieves over 110Mbit/s, Freescale revealed that its planned UWB product families will be engineered to deliver 220Mbit/s, 480Mbit/s and 1Gbit/s data transfer rates.
Consistent with its current UWB offerings, the planned UWB families will be engineered to support peer-to-peer as well as ad hoc networking for truly mobile wireless connectivity.
To address the demand for a low power, cost-effective UWB solution for handheld applications such as mobile phones, media players, digital cameras and camcorders, Freescale's planned UWB product families will also be designed to integrate sophisticated power management tools to help extend battery life, a critical requirement for mobile applications.
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"Over the past two years, we have been working closely with UWB customers to understand their needs and requirements for high-datarate wireless connectivity", said Martin Rofheart, Director of UWB Operations at Freescale.
"As we plan commercial shipments of our current UWB solution, it's clear that a variety of speeds - from 100Mbit/s up to 1Gbit/s - as well as a variety of power requirements and ranges are needed to serve the broad range of emerging handheld, mobile and in-room video and audio applications".
"We believe, based on customer input, the product families detailed today will best serve CE vendors worldwide over the next three years".
Commenting on Freescale's roadmap and its significance to Motorola, John Barr, Business Development Director of Motorola's UWB Early Stage Acceleration Programme, stated: "As a leader in handset and set-top products, Motorola is focused on identifying and implementing the best performance/lowest cost solutions for our consumer and mobile electronics products".
"The DS-UWB silicon we have used from Freescale clearly demonstrates the superior performance, low power consumption and cost benefits this low complexity approach provides".
"These benefits, in combination with its regulatory compliance, make DS-UWB the ideal choice for Motorola consumer electronics products and will enable new, high-datarate applications to be conceived and developed by vendors such as Motorola".
The planned product families, which are to be designed to comply with the Federal Communications Commission's current Ultra-Wideband Report and Order, are scheduled to include driver support for multiple operating systems.
The mini-PCI and SDIO module form factor are expected to enable integration into the smallest consumer electronics, providing a variety of interfaces including PCI, mini-PCI, PCI-Express and USB2, and IEEE1394.
The Freescale media access control (MAC) chip is compliant with the IEEE802.15.3 MAC protocol, and the Freescale PHY, which is based on the 802.15.3a DS-UWB proposal, provides data transfer rates ranging from 110Mbit/s to 1Gbit/s.
This support helps CE vendors to ensure interoperability among their product lines.
To date, ultrawideband has been touted for consumer electronics products such as digital displays, DVD players, digital video recorders and set-top boxes, as well as handheld applications such as camcorders and digital cameras.
New, high-datarate applications are expected to emerge over the next three years and beyond that will further drive the need for products exceeding 1Gbit/s datarates.
For example, new media players that allow storage of multiple MPEG-4 movies will require 1Gbit/s UWB solutions to upload/download the entire movie in just a few seconds.
Portable hard drives are another emerging application, where users will want to use their hard drive at both the home and office.
While transferring data from the portable hard drive to the host computer, a datarate of 1Gbit/s is needed in order to keep other applications running during the continuous data transfers.
The Freescale XtremeSpectrum UWB chipset with over 110Mbit/s datarate has been sampling to customers worldwide and is expected to be commercially available Q3 2004.
Freescale's third-generation, two-chip UWB solution, with datarates greater then 220Mbit/s is expected to begin sampling Q4 2004.
Freescale 480Mbit/s and 1Gbit/s UWB families are expected to begin sampling over the next year.
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