Indian start-up announces support for SDIO-WiFi driver

embWiSe Technologies, a start-up in Chennai, India, announced support for SDIO-WiFi driver with their SDIOWorx Linux SDIO stack. This new embedded SDIO (Secure Digital I/O) stack is currently supported on Linux and uITRON OSes. According to Srini G. Srinivasan, managing director of embWiSe, a number of semiconductor and mobile device vendors are already using their stack to develop SDIO functionality in their respective chipsets and device designs.

"We have partnered with a leading WLAN vendor in North America to support their SDIO-WLAN driver with our SDIO stack. We will be offering the SDIO-WiFi driver in binary bundled with our stack, which would enable mobile device vendors to add support for WiFi straightaway without having to engineer and develop SDIO-WLAN driver/s," Srinivasan said.

With this announcement, said the company, they will be offering comprehensive wireless client driver solutions with SDIOWorx. SDIOWorx already has support for Bluetooth (TypeA) cards and the driver is delivered with the stack in source code as a reference sample driver. "One of the challenges, from what we have heard from some of our potential customers, is about apprehensions on the grey area or the interpretation of the Linux GPL. We have to respect the GPL as well as our agreement with the SDCard Association. So we have a unique design for our SDIOWorx, which mitigates the issues related to GPL and giving the flexibility to our customers to redistribute the stack in binary," commented embWiSe CTO V. Alagusankar.

The company has also ported SDIOWorx on Sharp's Zaurus SL-C3000 PDA. The SDIOWorx package for Zaurus SL-C3000 comes complete with the stack/bus driver and drivers for the host controller, SD/MMC memory cards, SDIO-Bluetooth (Type A) and SDIO-WiFi. "The addition of Wi-Fi support to our SDIOWorx stack would enable the device vendors to add SDIO-WiFi functionality to their SDIO based designs straightaway, reducing their engineering effort and time to market. Also, the bundled SDIO-WiFi reference driver with the SDIOWorx stack offers a significant advantage for the host CPU vendors to test and validate the SDIO functionality and performance in their SDIO host controller designs" added Srinivasan.

The Linux version of SDIOWorx has support for SD/MMC/MMCMobile and MMCPlus memory cards, SDIO-Bluetooth (TypeA), a generic SD-UART and SDIO-WiFi. The Host platform support includes the standards-based controller from Arasan Chip Systems and Tokyo Electron Devices and Intel PXA270 (Bulverde). embWiSe also has a basic uITRON SDIO stack with support for SD/MMC memory and SD-UART client drivers.