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Unleashing the Laptop

"UNH's InterOperability Lab has been very useful to us for two reasons," says Michael Paljug, a staff engineer at Intersil Corporation in Palm Bay, Fla. "We're testing things that help us to identify bugs and problems with our equipment. The setup of the lab is very conducive to engineers from different companies getting together unencumbered by the politics of the products."

Intersil makes semiconductor chips for wireless LAN cards, small boxes that free computers -- especially laptops -- from their electronic leashes.

InterOperability Lab
Computer science graduate students Haifeng Pan and Hui Chen are among the 15 students who work in the Fibre Channel Consortium. Photo by Michael Warren '83
Such cards plug into a communications slot on a computer and communicate with a central access point via radio waves. Users expect their laptops to operate as fast as a computer workstation in a modern office. The technology offered by Intersil -- its chip line is named PRISM -- can be used to configure houses and offices, allowing use of the Internet or company network from a couch or a conference room.

"We want our PC card to work with everybody else's access point, and their PC card to work with our access point," Paljug says. "At the IOL we're more comfortable showing our bugs. If we have problems, we're not trying to hide them; we're trying to fix them." Wireless communications is a hot field, with upwards of 50 companies vying for the marketplace's attention. "The companies that are providing this stuff are having a hard time meeting demand," Paljug said. "It's actually a very difficult period. Everybody wants it; it's almost painful."

--David Appell

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