William Kurt Dobson

In 2003 the founders of S5 Wireless, recognizing the limitations of existing location technologies, conceived of a novel RF approach to location and telemetry. The unconventional approach enjoys dramatic advantages across an array of performance metrics, offering high accuracy, low-latency, long battery life and excellent indoor coverage at a cost that enables rapid mass market adoption. Capable of serving standalone applications as well as fully integrated operation within existing data/voice applications, the S5 technology expands the possibilities of the LBS market. Historically, location and telemetry applications have faced four prominent barriers which have prevented mass market adoption of LBS. These barriers include: total cost, operational range, signal penetration and battery power. While existing wireless technologies meet a subset of these needs, a solution which simultaneously solves all requirements has proven elusive. This has resulted in applications which are only partially served by the chosen technology. Consequently, LBS market adoption has been constrained to a set of fragmented verticals rather than enjoying growth through mass market adoption driven by a horizontal technology enabler. This is no longer the case. Unlike conventional location and telemetry technologies, S5 meets all requirements to enable mass market adoption: Low Total Cost (hardware and subscription) Wide Area Coverage (metropolitan regions leading to global coverage) Excellent Indoor and Outdoor Coverage Long Battery Life (measured in years, not weeks) Low-latency and Rapid Updating (instant availability of present location) In function, S5’s tag is similar to an RFID tag, in that it can be easily embedded or attached to almost anything: products, people, pets, vehicles, etc. Further, with the integrated telemetry capability, the item can report “presence” information such as temperature, vibration, moisture or any other sensed aspect. However, unlike RFID systems, customers need not deploy, operate and maintain a multitude of expensive and proprietary tag readers. “Plug and Play” meets location and telemetry.

Starbridge Systems®, Inc. is a high performance computing company that offers hardware and development tools for grand challenges in computing for such industries as geophysics, bioscience, signal processing, and scientific research and development. Starbridge’s powerful tools–Hypercomputers and the Viva development environment and programming language–transform field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) into a reconfigurable computing system with unprecedented power and flexibility. The Hypercomputer provides significant advantages in speed, flexibility, versatility and efficiency of size, weight and electrical power consumption. While reconfigurable technologies have been in use for many years, their widespread adoption has been slowed by unwieldy, text-based programming languages and development tools that make programming FPGAs laborious and time-consuming. Consequently, these tools are out of date relative to the incredible rate of growth and capability of the latest FPGAs; that is, until Starbridge created Viva, a fully integrated, object oriented, graphical development environment.