Samsung introduces wireless USB

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1731131/samsung-introduces-wireless-usb

ELECTRONICS MAKER Samsung has released a wireless universal serial bus (WUSB) that uses Ultra Wide Band (UWB) technology.

The UWB WUSB is offered in a two-chip module with the racy name of S3C2680/S5M8311 WUSB. Samsung sings that it will enable high definition content to be wirelessly transmitted from a mobile host device to a tethered device for viewing.

Samsung is targetting the hardware for high-resolution cameras, camcorders,TVs and PCs with prospects for adoption in other applications including tablet PCs, printers, beam projectors, portable HDDs, Blu-ray players and... (drum roll, please) mobile handsets.

Yiwan Wong, Samsung's VP of system LSI marketing said that the ability to handle wireless high-speed data transmission while consuming less power is a key requirement for many consumer electronic devices these days.

Samsung's WUSB chipset manages a 480Mbps data transmission rate at an average power consumption of less than 300mW, which Samsumg hopes is low enough to get system designers interested.

The chips are made using 65nm low power logic process technology and are a combination of a system-on-chip baseband processor and an RF transceiver.

The WUSB chipset can be shoved under the bonnet of an SD card, bunged into a USB dongle or embedded in all sorts of consumer and mobile applications.

It allows wireless transmission at an actual information throughput rate of over 200Mbps with power efficiency ten times greater than that of the 802.11g WiFi standard. With multi-threshold support, this new chipset also has 30 per cent lower power consumption over current WUBS hardware available on the market today.

The kit has an embedded NAND flash memory controller built-in, and Samsung is pretty sure its WUSB chipset is the only product in the market that can support WUSB-enabled SD cards

A WSUB-enabled SD card allows pictures and video captured with a digital camera or camcorder to be transmitted wirelessly from the device to a host computer, a TV or a PC monitor for viewing without any wire connection required to download the contents from the SD card.

The chipset is based around an ARM 9 core, and has WiMedia v1.2 PHY and also has various interfaces such as SDIO, SD card, SD host, as well as a NAND flash controller and two high-speed USB 2.0 PHYs.

If you are worried about security, the WUSB kit will beam your signal through the airwaves using a 128-bit AES encryption algorithm for secure data transmission.

The Samsung WUSB chipset is slated for mass production in the fourth quarter but there is no word on price yet. µ