Wireless USB in a dongle

The promise of wireless USB seems unbeatable—eliminate all those little, somehow inflexible cables that make a rat's nest of everyone's desktops, and turn where to put the printer into a spatial-visualization test. But in reality, unless you have a large number of peripherals, wireless-USB equipment has to be extremely compact and inexpensive to avoid being more of a hassle than those stinking wires. Therefore, in turn, the dongle that turns a USB port on the PC into a wireless base station has to exploit the greatest possible level of integration. But a single chip combining a USB wired interface, controller, wireless baseband, and RF is still technically a little out of reach. Here’s a look at how one vendor, Wisair, is approaching the problem today with a production-ready reference design.

Please click here for illustration