WLAN Chips Lower Cost And Complexity Of Home Gateway Products

The XWAY WAVE 1000 family of single-chip wireless local-area network (WLAN) ICs from Infineon provide a high-performance and cost-effective solution for wireless network access points that comply with the 802.11n draft standard for data rates up to 150 Mbits/s as well as the 802.11 b/g standard.

The ICs integrate the WLAN baseband, media access controller (MAC), RF, low-noise amplifier (LNA), and power amplifier (PA) functionalities (see the figure). They also require the industry’s lowest number of external components and need no external memory. This reduces the bill of materials (BOM) and cuts board space by up to 70%.

In WLAN equipment manufacturing, 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 lifetime.

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, it also makes external trimming during manufacturing unnecessary. And, it minimizes calibration time during manufacturing.

The chips are available with either an SDIO or PCI interface. They also are compatible with Infineon’s xDSL chips. The XWAY WAVE100 family’s advanced power-management modes reduce power consumption by at least 25% compared to existing 802.11n solutions.

As for RF performance, the output power is at least 2 dBm higher than available solutions. Receiver sensitivity is –90.5 dBm at 11 Mbits/s (11b), ¬–76.5 dBm at 54 Mbits/s (11g), and –73.5 dBm at 150 Mbits/s (11n 1x1). Antenna diversity is supported to improve receiver sensitivity. The chips run on a single 3.3-V supply, operate at 2.4 GHz, and support both 20-MHz and 40-MHz bandwidths. They come in a PG-VQFN-108 package. Production quantities will be available in the fourth quarter of 2009. Reference designs together with Infineon’s xDSL single-chips are also available.

Infineon Technologies AG