Keyssa, a device connection startup, has teamed up with Samsung and Hon Hai Precision Industry, the parent company of Foxconn, to announce its new “Connected World” standard, which seeks to utilize Keyssa’s own “Kiss” technology to send large amounts of data quickly between individual devices. Specifically, Connected World is intended to enable data transfers on the order of gigabits within just a few seconds. The new standard is not based on Wi-Fi, and can be applied in both the Internet of Things and in smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices.
This is an expansion of the Kiss technology that was previously available only on smartphones. The new Kiss connector powering Connected World is different from Keyssa’s first model, and allows vastly higher transfer speeds, up to 6 gigabits per second. The connector has been made universal, with a single unified software stack that allows it to connect almost any device. Because of its high data transfer rates and ease of implementation, the second generation Kiss chip can not only transfer data between devices very quickly, but it has the potential to become a drop-in modularity solution for smartphone makers. Essentially, this means that the Samsung Galaxy S9, for example, could have mods that enhance its functionality, much like the Moto Z2 Force and the less popular LG G5.
The secret behind Kiss and Connected World is a specially made chip, not unlike an NFC chip, that can communicate at speed with other devices that use the chip. The Kiss chip uses an extremely high frequency signal for fast data transfer. The signal is not like what’s being used in most modern networks. As a rule of thumb, a transmitter with high frequency can move large amounts of data, but does so at a shorter range. This is the principle behind small cells in mobile carriers’ modern cellular networks, which is part of what is going to enable true 5G wireless connections in the near future. While this is not always completely true, depending on a number of factors such as optimization and network signal strength, beaming raw data from one device to the other using the solid-state Kiss chip happens over just a few millimeters, allowing great speed.