Bluetooth & ultra wide band, an unbeatable pairing?

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 06 October 2005 17:44

Business IT - Technology

Freescale Semiconductor has staged the first demonstration of a device based on its chipsets that supports communication using two short range wireless technologies: the established, but low speed bluetooth, and the emerging ultra wide band technology which supports much higher speeds.

The demonstration, at a US conference featured two laptops, each enabled with a UWB module and Bluetooth dongle. According to Freescale, files were exchanged using bluetooth at 1Mbps then using the UWB radios with Open Interface's BLUETusk software solution at up to 110Mbps,

A key aspect of the demonstration was that both cases the communication used the Bluetooth protocol stack. According to Greg Burns, CTO for Open Interface North America "Bluetooth's core strengths are ad-hoc connectivity and its portfolio of profiles. Put these together the right way with UWB's high data rate capabilities and you've got an unbeatable high-speed data exchange system for wireless consumer products." He added: "We were pleased to note that no modifications to our profiles or applications were required in order to support the integration of UWB and the higher data-rates."