The embedded wireless connectivity market has proven too good for Atheros Communications Inc. to resist.
The company this week made its grand entrance into embedded wireless connectivity with two single chip wireless LAN devices that target mobile devices ranging from VoIP to MP3 players.
"The focus for us has been in the data networking and consumer electronics areas for some time," Alex Liu, Business Development Manager at Atheros, said. "We didn't see the need for high rate Wi-Fi functionality in these mobile embedded devices until this market took off. Now that we are seeing undeniable evidence of such market trends we are addressing it."
The trends Liu references include expected strong growth in WLAN-enabled mobile devices from IDC, which sees the market reaching $614 million by 2009, a 95 percent compound average growth rate.
Specifically, the Radio-on-Chip for Mobile (ROCm) products include single- and dual-band chips, the AR6001G and AR6001X, respectively; integrate 802.11 media access control, baseband and radio-frequency functionality; and run at 54Mbits/sec. connectivity, Atheros said.
The AR6001G builds off of Atheros' previous single-chip solutions. The company in the last 16 months has laid out single-chip 802.11g and 802.11a/g PCI and PCI Express clients, a single-chip SoC for 802.11g access points, and a production-ready single-chip PHS cellular-phone solution, the AR1900.
"This is at a time when most of our competitors are still shipping two or three chip solutions to this market space," Liu noted. "What single chip allows us to do is achieve very low power; we obviously occupy less space than something that is a two or three chip solution; because we are a single chip we don't have to incur the yield losses or packaging costs of two or three single chips; and to boot we have integrated a number of features in support of voice QoS, voice power save, and radio co-existence."
Further, to ensure that end users have an easy way to configure their ROCm-enabled devices, Atheros has offered the JumpStart for Wireless secure configuration tool, which, with the press of a button, consumers can use to establish secure connections between their mobile devices and personal WLANs.
Atheros is now sampling the AR6001G and AR6001X, with volume production scheduled for Q3. The company claimed, but would not detail, significant design wins with major OEMs for the products. The JumpStart code is available on an open-source basis.
