Atheros Ships Single-Chip 802.11g

Atheros Communications announced volume shipments of a single-chip IEEE 802.11g WLAN solution -- an industry first, according to the company. The CMOS device integrates a Media Access Controller (MAC), a baseband processor, a high-performance 2.4-GHz radio, and many of the discrete components used in earlier 802.11g designs, resulting in a 35% part count reduction from products based on two-chip solutions, and a similar reduction in BOM (bill-of-materials) costs.



The new Atheros chip leverages better signal processing technology that extends the battery life of mobile devices by dynamically adjusting power consumption in response to system and network activity. Atheros said this technique delivers up to 98% lower power consumption than multi-chip WLAN solutions on the market today. The chip also supports Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA and WPA2) and 802.11i Enhanced Security using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in hardware. It also fully supports the Wireless Media Extensions (WME) Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities defined in the IEEE 802.11e draft standard. http://www.atheros.com