Staccato Communications, developer of Ultra Wideband (UWB) devices, and SK Telecom, a mobile phone and broadband operator in Korea, plan to deliver (UWB) wireless personal-area network (WPAN) mobile phone services. These networks will combine features used by current online social networking services, such as MySpace, with the capabilities of mobility and wireless connectivity enabled by cellular handsets. The end result may be a form of socialization that combines the effectiveness of online services with the richness of face-to-face interaction.
SK Telecom selected Staccato for the company’s Ripcord single-chip, all CMOS-based family of solutions. As a result of this partnership, customers will be provided with increased choices for content delivery from access points, connecting mobile phones to larger displays, such as those in PCs, TVs (shown in the Figure) and cars, connecting mobile phones to PCs and their peripherals, and sharing profiles and content from one user to another through personal area social networking (PASN).
Services developed and launched by SK Telecom and Staccato will be standardized and offered worldwide to other operators after initial launch in Korea. With this introduction of UWB WPAN mobile phone services, customers will have expanded options and bandwidth, communicating directly with other mobile users or from kiosks at 480 Mbps for entertainment content delivery to their mobile devices.
With the choice of the WiMedia Common Radio Platform as the foundation for the project, SK Telecom and Staccato are developing 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.
