SK Telecom Partners to Develop UWB Handsets
Staccato Communications and South Korea's SK Telecom have unveiled plans for the delivery of Ultra Wideband (UWB) wireless personal area network (WPAN) mobile phone services. SK Telecom says that it selected Staccato for the company's UWB silicon products and for the Ripcord single-chip, all CMOS-based family of solutions.
Services developed and launched by SK Telecom and Staccato will be standardized and offered worldwide to other operators after initial launch in Korea.
With the choice of the WiMedia Common Radio Platform as the foundation for the project, SK Telecom and Staccato are developing together applications using several protocols. This benefit is enabled by Staccato's PIK MAC (Medium Access Control) technology, which is a Protocol Independent Kernel, based on a custom implementation of hardware acceleration and ARM9 software control. This patent pending technology enables the simultaneous operation of Certified Wireless USB, WiNet, Bluetooth 3.0 and other potential protocols at speeds up to 480 Mbps.
Products will initially launch with WiMedia radios using spectrum below 6GHz (band group 1, band 3) and add above 6GHz operation when the WiMedia Alliance completes the certification process for these bands.
"The SK Telecom - Staccato announcement is significant for at least three reasons. First, it signals adoption of UWB in mobile handsets much sooner than anyone had anticipated. Second, it shatters the assumption that a mobile carrier is not willing to use UWB products operating below 6GHz. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, the value of the UWB applications and services envisioned by SK Telecom looks like it could be very high and very beneficial to both the users and the carriers," said Fiona Thomson, market analyst, IMS Research.
For the first phase, a Korean-based, leading manufacturer of handsets worldwide will be the handset developer for the new WiMedia UWB handsets."
Posted to the site on 18th December 2006