Most wireless chip sets, such as those for 802.11 Wi-Fi applications, feature a PCI bus for ease of connectivity to the external processor. The PCI bus is targeted simply because of the high volume of available PCs that will potentially adopt a wireless interface. Yet this type of bus greatly limits the use of the wireless chip sets in other applications, particularly those in portable devices. Even though some wireless chip sets support miniPCI and Cardbus, this rules out the use of a whole range of popular and widely used embedded microcontrollers. Bridging solves this problem.
Click here to download the PDF version of this entire article.