Freescale Semiconductor outlined its ultrawideband (UWB) product roadmap this week, as the Motorola subsidiary attempts to go it alone against a consortium of competitors.
Freescale, which owns XtremeSpectrum, said that it plans to ship its first UWB chip delivering 110-Mbits per second of total bandwidth in the third quarter of 2004. A two-chip, 220-Mbit/s solution should ship in the fourth quarter, the company said. During 2005, Freescale will ship UWB components achieving 480-Mbit/s and 1-Gbit/s data rates, the company said.
Freescales XtremeSpectrum subsidiary has fought the MultiBand OFDM Alliance — consisting of Intel Corp., Texas Instruments, and others — over the future of USB, seen as the wireless future of USB and other short-range wired I/O devices. Like the MBOA, Freescales XtremeSpectrum division said that USB and the IEEE 1394 protocols were compliant with the technology; PCI and PCI Express interfaces should also be built onto the technology, the company said.
The technology is allegedly governed by the IEEE 802.15.3a working group, which has considered both the XtremeSpectrum and Freescale proposals for the draft version of the specification.
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