Ultra Wideband (UWB) chipset manufacturers are getting together to test their products against each other to avoid the interoperability problems which plagued Bluetooth.

“Work is going on between WiQuest, Wisair [an Israeli UWB manufacturer], Staccato Communications and Alereon to test our products for interoperability. The first results will be out in the next couple of months,” Dave Brenner, v-p for marketing and business development at US UWB start-up WiQuest, told Electronics Weekly.

Other UWB firms such as Pulse-Link and Freescale are going their own way, although Francois Fortun, Freescale’s marketing manager for EMEA, told EW: “We are working hard on interoperability, it’s one critical area for success of UWB. But there’s no UWB device on the market so we haven’t seen any compatibility trials.”

Another critical area for success of UWB is ease of use, because UWB will be going into consumer devices like cameras, camcorders and notebooks. “We’re working on wizards, on auto-discovery and auto-configuration, they are life and death for UWB success,” said Brenner

Although the UWB market will not start until autumn 2006, US venture capitalists are putting a lot of money into it. Alereon has raised $54m and Wiquest has raised $15m.

www.wiquest.com