No IFs about Prism with direct down conversion

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team May 11, 2001

Intersil has revealed advance details of its next generation Prism 3 WLAN chipset, the industry's first two-chip solution.

Intersil has revealed advance details of its next generation Prism 3 WLAN chipset, the industry's first two-chip solution.

It is also the first to incorporate a zero-IF (ZIF) architecture allowing "direct down conversion" of radio frequency signals resulting in lower-cost, high performance wireless networking for consumer applications.

Its low cost makes it ideal for home wireless networking and it will be complement Intersil's existing Prism 2.5 chipset which provides a three-chip solution optimised for embedded enterprise and business systems.

The Prism 3 chipset consists of a direct down conversion (DDC) transceiver and an integrated baseband processor and medium access controller (BBP/MAC).

The highly integrated DDC transceiver takes high-frequency radio inputs and directly converts them to baseband signals during reception, and directly up-converts them from the low level baseband signal to radio frequency for transmission.

This new architecture completely eliminates the need for the usual intermediate frequency (IF) stage found in most radios, thereby reducing complexity, component cost and manufacturing cost.

The DDC transceiver communicates with the single chip BBP/MAC.

Tight coupling of the radio front-end and this advanced processor overcomes the DC offset problems normally associated with zero-IF radios.

This new technology significantly reduces the material and manufacturing cost of WLAN products without sacrificing performance.

Intersil will begin shipments of Prism 3 Developer's Kits in the Q2 of 2001.

The ISL3871 features both a PCMCIA and USB interface allowing easy-to-use, plug-and-play integration.

The new Prism 3 architecture allows WLAN products to be manufactured with a sub-$35 bill-of-materials with full compliance with the IEEE's 802.11b standard.

Prism 3 operates at 2.4GHz, delivers an 11Mbit/s datarate and can be Wi-FiT certified to ensure multivendor interoperability.