Single-chip WLAN ICs achieve 150Mbit/s

Infineon Technologies AG has released the new Xway Wave100 family of single-chip WLAN ICs that enable data rates up to 150Mbit/s, providing a high-performance and cost-effective solution for wireless network access points compliant with the 802.11n/b/g draft standards.

The single-chip Xway Wave100 family integrates the WLAN baseband, MAC, RF, LNA and power amplifier functionalities. Systems based on the Xway Wave100 family require the industry's lowest number of external components and need no external memory. This results in a rest of BOM that is about 25 percent lower than existing solutions in the market and up to 70 percent smaller board-space.

In the manufacturing of WLAN equipment, the production throughput largely depends on the trimming of the WLAN device to achieve optimum performance. Trimming adjusts for the characteristics of analog components which vary with the silicon process, temperature and life-time. With the Xway Wave100 family, Infineon provides an innovative integrated tool-box to support on-the-fly trimming with temperature, voltage and supply monitoring during standard operation mode. This provides savings on expensive RF test equipment, in many cases makes external trimming during manufacturing unnecessary, and minimizes calibration time during manufacturing.

"With the new Xway Wave100 family, Infineon enables customers to meet growing consumer demand for high-speed wireless connectivity by offering WLAN 802.11n 1x1 with up to 4x more speed than earlier generation WLANs at the price of legacy 802.11b/g systems," said Christian Wolff, president of the wireline communications division at Infineon. "By combining our system know-how with expertise in chip design, we focus on product innovations to reduce the total system manufacturing cost for our customers."

The Xway Wave100 single-chips are available with either SDIO or PCI interface. When used in combination with the Xway Amazon-SE and Xway ARX182 ADSL2+ single-chips for low-cost xDSL WLAN router and gateway respectively, the SDIO variant frees up the USB 2.0 Host interface of the xDSL single-chips for other tasks such as connecting a hard disk, printer or 3G dongle. The PCI variant can be used in combination with Xway ARX100 family for full-featured WLAN gateways.

The Xway Wave100 family features advanced power management modes to reduce the power consumption by at least 25 percent compared to existing 802.11n solutions in the market. Different power modes including sleep and diverse power-down states are implemented. Infineon again sets a benchmark in energy efficiency by enabling customers to create green designs which exceed the requirements of the European Union Code of Conduct on energy consumption of broadband equipment.

The new solution achieves delivers high RF performance with output power at least 2dBm higher than available solutions in the market, sensitivity of -90.5dBm at 11Mbit/s (11b), -76.5dBm at 54Mbit/s (11g) and -73.5dBm at 150Mbit/s (11n 1x1). Furthermore antenna diversity is supported to improve receiver sensitivity. The Xway Wave100 family uses only a single 3.3V supply, operates at 2.4GHz and supports both 20MHz and 40MHz bandwidths.

Samples of the Xway Wave100 in a PG-VQFN-108 package are available with mass production starting Q4 09. Reference designs together with Infineon's xDSL single-chips are also available.

Keywords: WLAN   802.11n   802.11/b/g   broadband   baseband