Intersil, Palm Bay, FL is currently one of the leading providers of wireless technology. It can be said, that Intersil is to wireless technology as Intel is to PC technology. Their Wi-fi chip sets can be found in most of the wireless products.

So when Intersil approached Compsee, a wireless terminal provider, for help in incorporating portable wireless technology into their test and probe facility, Compsee was very attentive.

Looking for the Ideal Terminal
Intersil came to Compsee looking for a mobile device for data collection within their manufacturing environment. Although there are many data collectors on the market, the ideal unit for Intersil would need to seamlessly communicate with the Cisco Wireless infrastructure they currently used to support mobile communications within their Palm Bay facility.

Paul Bridge (Senior Engineering Specialist) for Intersil stated, "Cisco's wireless products can work well with any industry compliant radio card, but there are always subtle advantages in keeping like product with like product. We wanted a portable that used a Cisco radio card. Cisco is not in the portable industry so I knew I had to go to a third party for the solution."

Apex III fit the requirements
The perfect choice for Intersil was Apex III Portable Data Collector from Compsee. "It was the only portable on the market that we found would allow us to use any industry standard radio card we chose. It's design incorporates PC Card (PCMCIA) technology. All that was required to make it Cisco ready was to add a Cisco card and the proper drivers," stated Mr. Bridge.

The Interface Issue
Communicating through the Cisco infrastructure only addressed the wireless infrastructure compatibility issue. Mr. Bridge had other issues that needed to be resolved. "I needed to have a way to easily interface, via an NT platform, to my host application on a DEC system. We did not want to go out of house to have the applications written and I did not want an expensive and hard to use middleware solution. I needed something I could take and run with," says Mr. Bridge.

Compsee provided the solution in the software integration tools that are offered with their Apex line of portable terminals. The middleware solution Intersil needed was the telnet client from Connect, which allows the terminal to operate in a terminal emulation mode. Along with this, Compsee provided AirLinc, an application generator tool that was the final piece in the puzzle.

The Right Solution
In summarizing his experience, Paul Bridge stated: " I am a VB programmer and found AirLinc to be an excellent tool to allow me to address the middleware issues required in integrating the Apex III wireless device with our host DEC application. I was able to do it on my own and now I have a solution that I know we can support internally."

"I was very fortunate in finding Compsee, Inc. So many companies nowadays try to over complicate issues of this type and at a very high cost. Not so with Compsee. They promote themselves as the wireless connectivity specialists. They say they can make it easy to interface with existing host applications. In my case they proved themselves completely. I feel I have the highest quality solution at a very reasonable cost!"