In anticipation of a big market for ultra wideband products, Samsung has announced a new wireless USB System-on-Chip.
The technology can reach download speeds of up to 120 Mbps, and can pull in a 700 MB movie file in roughly a minute. Expect to see the chip in digital cameras and mobile phones at first, followed by printers, beam projectors, hard disks, displays, and wireless speakers.
Wireless data transfer already exists in some of those products with built-in Bluetooth or Wi-Fi adapters. Ultra wideband (UWB) trades long signal range for high bandwidth, so it's less likely than Wi-Fi to get mixed up with other wireless signals.
Also, we've seen UWB featured into some laptops already, like Lenovo's Thinkpad X200 T, but Samsung's chip is geared more towards the products that sync up with the computer. Samsung says its chip is ideal for portable electronic devices because of its low 300mW power consumption. It also uses a 128-bit Advanced Encryption Standard and "a static signal that makes hacking through wiretapping and signal tracing difficult."
Another interesting point to note: Samsung specifically mentions peer-to-peer sharing through mobile phones without a host computer as one of the chip's perks. Perhaps future Samsung phones will encourage that kind of behavior.
The chips will enter mass production in the second quarter of this year, so inclusion in consumer products should follow soon after.
