The TransferJet short-range wireless technology is finally approaching commercial adoption. The transceiver IC needed to make compliant equipment was released by developer Sony Corp. to the merchandise market in November 2009. The IC can be combined with a special coupler, RF filter, and other peripheral components to enable TransferJet functionality. The first compliant products are expected to appear as early as spring 2010.
Sony has already prototyped a TransferJet-compliant Memory Stick. Companies like KDDI Corp. and Toshiba Corp. have also demonstrated TransferJet-compliant equipment such as mobile telephones and notebook PCs.
TransferJet was originally developed by Sony. It is designed to enable file swapping by "touching" two pieces of equipment together: bringing them within about 3cm of each other. The technology was first demonstrated at the 2008 International CES in January 2008. A consortium was established in July of the same year by Sony and 14 other supporting companies (the total is now 19). In November 2009, about a year later, Sony announced that the specs were "essentially complete." During the standardization process, a number of consortium members including Sony showed eagerness to finalize the standard as soon as possible.
Sony has done its homework when it comes to prepping TransferJet for the market. There are two host interfaces on the transceiver IC, for example, one supporting PCI and Mini PCI, and other supporting SDIO, as shown in Table 1. Both interface standards are widely used for internal data transfer in audio-visual (AV) equipment, PCs, and other equipment. A source at Sony comments that SDIO in particular "supports almost all of the application processors used in mobile phones."
The standard currently supports SDIO Ver. 2.0, with a max data transfer rate of 200Mbit/s. This is far below the max effective data rate of TransferJet itself, which is 375Mbit/s. Internal transfer standards for mobile phones are even faster, such as MIPI, with a max data transfer rate of 1Gbit/s. There are few examples of MIPI in the market yet, though, leading Sony to adopt SDIO because "We assigned a higher priority to adoption in the market place than to the data transfer rate."
In the future the company expects to resolve the SDIO bottleneck, because SDIO Ver. 3.0 has already been standardized, boosting the max data rate to 104Mbyte/s. The first portable equipment supports TransferJet with Ver. 3.0 is expected to appear in around 2011.
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