As an advocate for our future of the wireless Internet, I am depressing to watch as I bring power strips to manage my computer and phone. My use of my phone has a hot spot almost everywhere I travel, and it has made me sadly cabled to power outlets. If you are ever looking for me, I am probably no more than five feet from any wall with an outlet. In my car, I have the lighter charger that is an A/C converter connected to a power strip, as well, which for some of my vehicles makes my AAA card valuable.

With that as a backdrop, you can understand my excitement for GainSpan.

While out in California a few weeks ago, I met with GainSpan and got to hear their story of low-power consumption WiFi solutions. Having been funded by the likes of Intel (News - Alert) Capital (it spun off from Intel in 2006), New Venture Partners, Opus Capital, OVP Venture Partners, Sigma Partner and Camp Ventures, the company has raised over $30 million. 

The solutions they have built for systems on a chip include the 802.11b radio, media access controller, a baseband process, applications processor and flash memory. More importantly the semiconductor has a simple serial interface that allows any 8-32 bit host microcontroller to add WiFi (News - Alert), speeding up the development time.

WiFi has become pervasive and with carriers using it to support traffic offload, it is logical to think that more solutions for the “Internet of things” will incorporate WiFi. In addition to the chip features, the GainSpan SoCs feature the WiFi Alliance (News - Alert) WiFi Certification for WiFi Protected Set-Up (WPS). This will enable companies to incorporate the GainSpan into their solutions for markets such as healthcare, smart energy (residential and commercial), and industrial controls. Given that we want WiFi in our homes anyways, the ability to connect to the Internet via our existing network is very compelling. In my humble opinion, as Zigbee becomes an over-the-top protocol riding on WiFi, I would expect more companies to develop using GainSpan as SoC of choice. 

The markets GainSpan is focused on not only include the 2B WiFi devices currently deployed, but the 9B embedded microcontrollers.

While not aimed at my phone, or my computer, it does represent solutions for home use that I expect will start creeping into our lives in the near future.

The connection of water heaters and other large appliances are probably going to be slow going; but as the electric car and home entertainment and fitness systems get added, the use of WiFi will manifest itself in not only remote monitoring and management but innovative blended applications. 

While I still am looking for the battery side to innovate, it’s nice to see that I may one day get to unplug my Internet and still have my things connected.