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.
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| Figure 5: Ascalade handset | Figure 6: Linksys handset |
Contest #29 Results 
