2. Inside Story

The base conveniently receives its power from the USB connection and has Power, In Use and what looks to be a handset page button. The inside shot of the Ascalade reference design (Figure 4) shows that it uses a National Semiconductor SC14438, which I'm guessing is a variant of the National Semiconductor SC14428 Baseband Processor. The chip incorporates a National 16 bit CompactRISC CR16C Microprocessor, DSP, and four 32 kbit/sec ADPCM transcoders among other features.

Figure 4: Base station innards
(click image to enlarge)

Figure 5 and 6 show that the handset designs differ in styling details only, while Figure 7's internal view mainly serves to show the rear-facing speaker. I can't tell whether the speaker lets the handset support speakerphone mode, nor can I see if there's a jack to allow a headset to be connected.

Figure 5: Ascalade handset	Figure 6: Linksys handset

Figure 7: Handset internal view