Plexus Corp. has announced that its electronics engineering subsidiary,
Plexus Technology Group, has successfully developed an inexpensive 5GHz radio
module which can operate in any of the three U-NII bands.
In development for over a year, the radio is capable of communicating at 20 Mbits/second in both
directions over ten miles line of sight and several hundred feet within a
building. The first in a series of gallium arsenide MMIC chips will become
available through Plexus early next year.
The radio is suitable for a wide range of commercial, industrial, telecom,
medical and consumer products.
In one application, two personal computers separated by several miles are
simultaneously transmitting in real time very high quality digital streaming
video (30 fps) and audio to the other computer’s hard drive and display. This
is being accomplished without any add-on boards or hardware modification to
the computers themselves.
“This particular broadband application, using our radio, creates the very
real possibility that several computers in a neighborhood, for example, will
soon be able to directly communicate visually to one another in real time
while bypassing all wired infrastructures,” said Dean Foate, president of
Plexus Technology Group.