Silicon Wave Inc. announced that it has implemented the piconet and master/slave switch features into its Odyssey(TM) solutions for Bluetooth(TM) wireless communications.
The first to announce support of both piconet and master/slave switch, Silicon Wave will be demonstrating a Bluetooth Personal Area Network (PAN) among a variety of mobile devices at the Bluetooth Congress 2000 in Monte Carlo, June 13-16, 2000. These networking features are implemented in Silicon Wave's Odyssey SiW016(TM) Link Controller IC and lower layer Bluetooth software, connected to the Odyssey SiW015(TM) Radio Modem IC.
"Piconet and master/slave switch are critical parts of the vision of Bluetooth," said Dave Lyon, Silicon Wave's chief executive officer. "Although started with the vision of cable replacement, Bluetooth technology has grown into a robust, ad hoc networking application that gets personal computing, organizing and phone devices work together simultaneously."
Piconet is the feature of the Bluetooth specification that allows networking among devices over Bluetooth radio connections to create a PAN. The piconet can be a point-to-point connection between two devices or a point-to-multipoint network with as many as eight devices in total. A typical PAN application using the piconet feature could include a desktop computer connected to the keyboard, mouse and printer using Bluetooth wireless connectivity.
An important feature of Bluetooth networking, the master/slave switch features allows another device to initiate joining an existing PAN. Using the example above, this particular feature enables another device, such as a PDA, to connect to the existing Bluetooth network of the desktop computer, mouse, keyboard and printer. Moreover, access to a Local Area Network (LAN) in an office or campus environment over a Bluetooth radio link requires the master/slave switch feature in order for another computer to initiate a connection via a Bluetooth LAN access gateway.
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