Rice University's Center for Multimedia Communication (
CMC) recently disclosed that its new technology called Wireless open-Access Research Platform, also referred to as
WARP, allegedly transfers data 100 times faster than 3G Networks (100x3G) and has many big players in different industries showing keen interest, buying the development kits, and are using them for innovative futuristic technological solutions.
WARP enables agencies to work on substituting and replacing existing technologies, and even experiment with hitherto unexplored zones. For example, NASA is working on a concept to reduce weight, cost and complexity of the wiring for communications and signals in spaceships, Motorola is developing a Greenfield project for wireless internet to reach rural India by creating low cost architecture and Toyota is attempting to avoid collisions between vehicles and enhance overall traffic management by testing car-to-car communications.
Invariably, the ultimate acceptance test for any new technology is when it is taken as a given, modified and adapted to sculpt something different. Some companies were discovered to be dismantling and reassembling the hardware with additions, and maybe subtractions, to create new functions. "That's one of the best things about WARP. It is going to lead to innovations that we could never have anticipated. ," said Ashutosh Sabharwal, Director of CMC.
WARP is a flexible tool developed with expansion feasibility for wireless researchers to qualify and quantify their ideas by writing programs which then transform WARP boards functionally into the newly conceived types of wireless device – maybe transmitters, or routers, or access points, to name a few. Physically, at first glance it looks like a middle to late 90’s computer motherboard with a few satellite boards in attendance. Up close it’s a high end adaptable rig with a Virtex-II Pro(cessor) from XILINX, an arsenal of transmitters and other related wireless devices.
The manufacturing, sales and support for all the different types of WARP boards, for Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Radio, Clock and Analog, and kits, for Multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) and single-input and single-output systems (SISP), are being managed by
Mango Communications.
A futuristic Cognitive Radio (CR) WARP prototype is on the cards. Cognitive Radio attempts to intelligently adapt its settings to log on to the best frequency available to deliver peerless digital exchanges. Majorly untapped frequencies worldwide to be utilized on the RF spectrum for this purpose are the ones used for amateur radio and paging, that is in the range of 30MHz to 300MHz.
WARP has funding from the National Science Foundation till 2010. Incidentally, within the first year of funding, WARP prototypes were ready for delivery. Now with enquiries, feed-back, and order positions looking up, further funding, either for more research or for business, should not be a bother.
There have been in existence different and well known expansions and uses for WARP, or Warp, in the field of IT. IBM released an Operating System (OS) in 1994 called OS/2 version 3.0, or Warp. APT International developed software called WARP to improve IBM’s Mainframe performance. Cypress Semiconductor worked on a project called Warp for developing a low cost Hardware Description Language (HDL) for Very High Speed Integrated Circuits (VHSIC’s) – shortened to VHDL – to be used in Complex Programmable Logic Devices (CPLD’s). Microsoft developed, as a part of Windows 7, a Windows Advanced Rasterization Platform (WARP) for its Multimedia and games application programming interfaces (APIs), which are collectively known as Direct X. In the IT wing of security systems Warning, Advice and Reporting Points are known as WARP’s. In Single Instruction Multiple Thread (SIMT) architecture, Warp is a type of multithreading.
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