First wireless USB chips certified

ONE OF THE JOYS of international travel is you can sometimes get a press release on the day before it is sent, and completely miss it for a week. That is the case with the release of the first Wireless USB certified chips.

Intel and NEC have long had host chips out, but now Alereon follows it up with a device side chip. All have passed USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) Wireless USB 1.0 compliance testing. This means they can now be put into actual devices and sold to you in short order.

Like early Bluetooth setups, you will initially see them sold in pairs, a dongle and a device, but as they become common in the marketplace and built into devices, you will see more and more sold apart.

The spec calls for 480Mbps at 3M, dropping to 110Mbps at 10M, but as always your mileage (kilometerage in Euroland) may vary. Since it uses a very wide band to transmit on at sub-noise levels, it should be fairly resistant to interference.

The technology works on 3.1 to 10.6 Ghz band, but the initial chips will do 3.1 to 4.something Ghz. If you have a way to make CMOS transmitters that work in the 10GHz range, please call the USB-IF, they probably want to talk to you.

There are 14 different time slots and a number of hopping codes available, so you should have very little problem with interference. On top of this, there are detect and avoid algorithms inbuilt, Alereon calls theirs Cognify, and this will help a bit. Additionally, with the short ranges involved, it looks possible to wire up an entire office with widgets and not step on each other in a horrible way.

With the bandwidth available, one of the things the WUSB folk are talking about is a generic wireless docking station. You bring your laptop/palm/prosthetic leg home and it syncs up to the dock/monitor/backup drive without doing anything. Quite a nice change from the mess of docking today.

The pairing has an interesting twist, you can do an association in a similar way to current Bluetooth devices, IE over the air, or wired. The OTA version is something you are probably familiar with, but the wired one only needs to be done once. You plug them in together, the parts exchange keys, and they are paired.

All of the data that is transmitted in encrypted so security is a bit more robust than previous standards that occupy the same rough niche. While it isn't uncrackable, it should keep all but the most determined prying eyes out.

Last up is the big one, power. The first gen devices are built on a .13 process, huge by modern standards, and are not exactly tweaked the way an older technology is. Right now, you have about the same power use as Wifi, basically a lot.

The up side is that you have a lot of bandwidth, so you can burst the data out and go to sleep. If you have something that uses 10W for 10S or 20W for 1S, which do you think sucks less power? WUSB hopefully will make up for the added power use with shorter transmit times. Obviously this power consumption will go down with every new device generation.

Look for the first devices on the market in May or June, these will be smaller things, hubs, cameras and widgets. Q3 will see the release of laptops, and following that will be multifunction printers and the like to close out the year. Handhelds will probably be next year.µ