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New Atheros Silicon To Lower Pre-N Cost |
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Written by Adam Gosling
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Thursday, 31 August 2006 |
Atheros Communications has released a new chipset for Draft 802.11n
wireless networking equipment which it says will reduce the manufacturing cost
for vendors.
Reports suggest that the new silicon could drop the price of
Pre-n access points below US$100 by Christmas.
Atheros says it can cut
the cost of the devices by reducing number of MIMO aerials used. That will mean
a corresponding degradation in performance, but with Standards now gone to hell
in a hand basket, who cares? Sell what you like.
The AR5008V XSPAN chipset will be teamed with a new AR7100
network processor which is optimised for use in WLAN environments, says the company.
The two new silicon solutions will combine to lower the cost
of hardware.
The AR5008V reduces cost by skimping on number of transmitter/receiver
units. It supports only two rather than the three offered by Atheros' other
pre-standard offerings.
So while it will not be up to speed with the fastest
non-standard hardware, it will be faster than existing 802.11g Standards based equipment.
Dubbed XSpan 2x2 it should be capable of more than 100Mbps
at 15 metres or 25Mbps at 45 metres, according to company estimates. As with other
Atheros XSPAN products the AR5008V features all the mandatory technical
elements in the 802.11n Draft 1.0 specifications, though it is not known
whether this will enable interoperability with other vendors or with future
Draft 2.0 product from Atheros.
The new network processor will replace third party general
processors typically used by Atheros manufacturing partners. Available in
400MHz and 300 MHz speeds, the optimised network processors will work with the
XSPAN 3x3 as well as the new 2x2 chipsets.
The 400MHz AR7100P version supports Gigabit Ethernet, while
the 300MHz version supports only 100Mbps network connections. The improved processing capabilities will assist in home netowrking environments as it will help to support bandwidth intesnive applications susch as multimedia streaming as well as latency sensitive applications such as VoIP.
"Atheros is committed to delivering solutions that drive
mainstream market adoption of 802.11n technology," said Todd Antes, vice
president of marketing for Atheros.
Atheros' XSPAN technology has been widely adopted by leading
WLAN product manufacturers such as Belkin, D-Link and Linksys.
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