CoWare joins another UWB group

Manhasset, N.Y. - CoWare Inc. will announce today that it has joined the UWB Forum and added direct-sequence ultrawideband (DS-UWB) support to its Signal Processing Worksystem (SPW) system-level development library. The company-which in December announced library support for the competing OFDM ultrawideband scheme-said it is the first to support both UWB proposals and the only one supporting the Common Signaling Mode component of DS-UWB.

The rival proposals are being considered by the standards-setting IEEE 802.15.3a task group, which is striving to define a physical layer for short-range wireless communications at rates of as much as 480 Mbits/second.

Johannes Stahl, director of marketing at CoWare (www.coware.com), said both UWB proposals have merit and will apparently come to market irrespective of what happens at the IEEE. "We just want to encourage UWB development and give designers the flexibility to design with either [approach]," he said. Stahl said that CoWare's support for the Common Signaling Mode is important because CSM allows both UWB proposals to coexist and be supported by the .15.3a standard, when finished.

The Multiband-OFDM Alliance, which backs orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing rather than DS-UWB, remains opposed to CSM on the grounds that there should be only one .15.3a implementation, preferably its own.