Don't plan to sell your first chip - Bob Colwell, former Intel chief architect
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Qualcomm says Peanut to Bluetooth and Zigbee
BOFFINS AT the mobile chip designer Qualcomm are working on an ultra-low power short-range wireless technology that it thinks will knock the spots off Bluetooth and Zigbee.
Dubbed Peanut, the technology was announced at EmTech@MIT 2010.
Apparently the network will need just fractions of a milliwatt of power and will be able to transfer several megabits per second.
According to Computer World; researchers have been slaving away on the project since 2006.
It is fairly confident that Peanut will see off anything that Bluetooth and Zigbee can manage. Qualcomm claims that it will be available next year.
Its main claim to fame is its low power requirement, which means that you will be able to leave your wireless gadgets on without draining the batteries.
Qualcomm claims that it has lots of partners that are itching to use the Peanut technology. However it is not cutting research or dampening its enthusiam for 4G wireless communications, including LTE Advanced, which is where the company is still spending the lion's share of its R&D cash.
Of course these are different markets and anything that reduces battery consumption will be popular. µ
Tags: Boffin watch
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Same was said about bluetooth and then bluetooth 1.1 and 1.2 and 2.0 and then 2.1 and 3.0 about the power issues, and I'm not sure how much drain 3 actually does on a battery in real use.
And then there's 4.0
And the newer BT does much higher speed incidentally, by incorporating wifi into its setup, it's a trick but part of the specs and all modern BT modules also do wifi anyway since it's about the same frequencies.