Westlake Village (CA) - The WiMedia Alliance today announced that its first formal interoperability workshop successfully demonstrated initial interoperability between five different manufacturers. WiMedia UWB silicon from Alereon, Staccato Communications, Realtek Semiconductor, WiQuest Communications and Wisair participated in the workshop.

The trials were held January 23 - 25 at the Intel UWB Integration Lab in Hillsboro, Oregon. Future interoperability workshops are scheduled to be held quarterly, and formal certification testing is expected to come first for the PHY at the end of this quarter, followed by "application building blocks" by end of Q2’06 and consumer products by late Fall 2006.

The alliance said that the results "solidifies the Alliance’s projection that consumers will be able to purchase WiMedia certified products during the second half of 2006".

Consumer products based on Freescale’s competing DS-UWB technology that were demonstrated at last month’s Consumer Electronics Show are slated to be in stores by the end of March.