14 DAY TRIAL // Wireless USB hubs and dongles are quite a presence on the wireless market, but there are no native peripherals to be used with. Things have changed with Alereon and SunPlusIT having announced world's first Worldwide Wireless USB hard drive reference design, based on the Alereon AL5000 Worldwide Ultra Wideband Chipset and the SunPlusIT SPIF260A USB/SATA II storage controller.
The Worldwide design means that the device is covering all the WiMedia spectrum in a range of 3.1Ghz to 10.6Ghz, while maintaining its compliance with regulatory requirement set by local authorities. The new design aims especially at vendors of Certified Wireless USB product. It uses two already demonstrated technologies: Alereon's AL5000 worldwide Wireless USB chipset and the SunPlusIT USB to SATA chip, for the fastest time-to-market production cycle.
"This new wireless USB hard drive design is the fastest way for vendors to get Certified Wireless USB drives to market," said Eric Broockman, CEO of Alereon. "The AL5000 Family is the only proven wireless USB chipset that allows our customers such as SunPlusIT and Toshiba the ability to bring a single product to the market that will meet any local regulatory requirements."
The Alereon's AL5000 Worldwide Wireless USB chipset comes with all the necessary radio-frequency circuitry, such as synthesizer VCO/PLL, anti-alias filters, LNAs and transmit/receive (T/R) switches. The chipset is shipped with the necessary software for developing a fully-fledged USB product.
"The SPIF260A is the first ASIC to support SATA II and USB controller to support external storage solution with multi-functions like SD card reader, Fingerprint, RAID 5?SPIF260A could make the external storage design with easy, high performance and low cost," said CH. Kung, President of SunPlusIT.
The details have been barely outlined, but the advent of the Wireless USB technology is a starting point for the upcoming WUSB devices to the market.