Ultra-wideband
(UWB), please refer to
www.wimedia.org, is a
radio technology for wireless connection.
Wireless
USB (WUSB), please refer to
www.usb.org, will make USB devices much
easier to use. It chooses UWB as its radio solution. It will become the
preferred choice of the wireless
connections between a computer and its peripheral devices, like
keyboard/mouse, flash disk, DVD player, printer, handheld, mobile, etc.
It allows easy connection and data exchanging at high speeds (as fast
as USB2.0) without cables. Because no physical ports are required, it
is no longer a problem of finding a USB port on the box. It is a great
improvement to USB devices and we can foresee that WUSB products would
be used in business and home environments in the near future. A lot of
demos were showed in "Certified Wireless USB Developers Conference"
held in June, 2006.
There is an open industry standard available in usb.org since May,
2005. Several developers conferences were held in the passed year. Now,
there are already USB device vendors announced their product roadmaps.
It is expected that some WUSB products will be formally released by the
end of this year or earlier. It will be nice if solaris can support
this new generation of USB devices.
Besides WUSB host controller on the main board, WUSB spec also
introduces two kinds of adapters to make it possible to enable WUSB
support without update your PC boxes. If plug a host adapter (like a
flash disk size) to one of the USB2.0 ports on the box, then, as far as
the hardware ability is concerned, your PC box can connect with any
WUSB devices. If you also have a device adapter, then by plugging your
USB2.0 devices to the adapter, they can connect with the host without a
cable. Therefore, this technology is easy for users and the tendency is
clear that it will be popular in the near future.
Some prototypes are available, including HWA radio controller driver,
UWB framework module, UWB admin tool, Cable association driver,
firmware download driver, etc.
Prototyping and will prototype HWA host controller driver, DWA driver,
WUSB admin tool, daemon, whci driver, etc.