Silicon vendors have made it extremely easy to build wireless products like access points, gateways, routers, and radio modems. But they effectively leave the software efforts to designers. Some semiconductor companies supply drivers and other small support routines. Still, designers mostly are on their own in creating software for their wireless products.
Devicescape Software offers an appealing alternative. Its universal wireless development platform (version 2.0) simplifies development efforts and enables designers to create the special features they want, all the while speeding up the process (see the figure).
Based on the Linux operating system, the Devicescape platform is a comprehensive software suite that lets designers focus on creating feature-rich wireless devices. The platform supports the features of both the IEEE 802.11 standard and the Wi-Fi Alliance, including the new WPA2 and WMM specifications.
The software works with the latest chip sets from Atheros, Broadcom, and Conexant. Its Devicescape Studio is a richly featured, Eclipse-based graphical cross-development environment with extensive debugging features.
The platform's wireless subsystem includes access-point, client, and client-bridge modules. It also features chip-set drivers for the vendors mentioned above. Its datapath module permits hardware portability by abstracting the hardware driver interface.
Additionally, an embedded Linux distribution supports CPU architectures such as ARM, MIPS, and XScale. Other features include a virtual client simulator, an IEEE 802.11 frame generator, an IEEE 802.11 protocol analyzer, a wireless traffic sniffer, a TKIP countermeasures tester, and an electromagnetic-interference test-mode controller.
With Wi-Fi built into many new devices like projectors, network media players, remote monitoring, and control systems, this platform is worth a look if you need to expedite your development efforts. The software is available now. Contact Devicescape for details on different licensing modes.
Devicescape Software Inc.
www.devicescape.com