| The product in the article I think it said came from 2006? Not based on the chips I worked on, anyway. Just like early wifi, there were several companies working on wireless usb chips at the time, and performance could vary a lot depending on who's product you bought, and when. Here's an article about us I found from 2008. https://www.eetimes.com/staccato-communications-ultra-wideba... The "ripcord 2" chips (mentioned) definitely could do 480Mbps at short range. I worked on the design of the next generation after that (equal performance,
but lower-cost/lower-power-consumption), which never made it to the commercial market. "What happened" was the combination of the product/ market mismatch I mentioned above (like, the wireless laptop dock was cool for a demo, but it didn't charge your laptop battery like a regular wired dock would, so it wasn't actually practical for daily use) so we didn't have enough revenue to self- sustain, and the "great recession" meant investment dried up and we eventually just ran out of money. Staccato merged with a different wireless usb startup to try to delay the inevitable, and then tried to "pivot" to something profoundly stupid and I bailed at that point. (They did an internal demo of the new "product". It was maybe the worst tech demo I've ever seen. I was out 2 weeks later. I think the company dragged on for maybe another year.) |
Thanks much for the additional detailed background information. Sorry to hear about the slow demise of your former employer.