SOUTH PLAINFIELD, N.J.-International Wireless Technologies L.L.C. has developed a single-chip
solution that permits wireless device manufacturers to use one platform for multiple mobile and fixed voice and data
standards.
By mid-year, IWT said it expects to beta test with two equipment manufacturers its patent pending Re-
Configurable Application Specific Programmable Communications Platform, known as RASP-CP, said Laslo Gross, a
principal and founder of the privately held company.
Gross, formerly director of business development for AT&T
Corp., said IWT hopes to begin shipping its product during the fourth quarter of this year.
“People have
designed customized products for different air-interface standards or different operating systems at the same time as the
market is moving toward ubiquity,” he said.
“We set out to achieve simplicity, not complexity. We
would like to see a phone number associated with an individual, regardless of the device, so your [personal digital
assistant] could also become your pager and your phone.”
Large regional Bell operating carrier-based carriers,
which find themselves with geographically and technologically diverse wireless properties, will lead the push for
multistandard, single-chip solutions for end-user devices that a company like IWT offers, Gross said. In mid-March,
IWT began meeting with some of the RBOC wireless carriers, he added.
“We can do satellite phones. We
could do a world phone without increasing its cost” relative to handsets that employ a single wireless technology,
Gross said.
“We could make a pager into a voice pager, and it would cost only about $60. We can give pagers
easy access to e-mail, and we are talking to some paging companies, which need this to survive. Implementing speed
capability into the platform is quite easy, just another software load.
“We can do voice-activated dialing
because it doesn’t matter to a [digital signal processor] whether you’re speaking or whether it’s data.”
The two-
year-old company emerged in its current form after working first with an Israeli firm that developed for Aeronautical
Radio Link, a global positioning system device to be used by small planes. Aerlink serves the purpose of Bellcore, now
known as Telcordia Technologies Inc., for Israel’s airline industry, Gross said.
IWT then worked with a U.S.
Department of Defense supplier to devise a reconfigurable software radio that could be enhanced by GPS, Gross said,
adding that IWT “hired some of the brains behind this.”
At the time, IWT was headquartered in
Virginia, but it recently located to central New Jersey to be near the talent pool at the Wireless Information Network
Laboratory at Rutgers University.
“It was the natural evolution of software radio, and we looked to [original
equipment manufacturers] of cordless phones, mobile wireless devices and PDAs to see what the limiting factors are:
the ability to communicate inexpensively anywhere, anytime,” Gross said.
“Not only are we
price competitive in a multimode environment but also in a single mode environment because we designed this first
with a cordless application in mind, then decided we could use the same modulation schemes for wireless.”
