Chipset breathes new life into 2.4GHz at 54Mbit/s

Intersil has released the industry's first WLAN chipset designed to support the new 802.11g high-rate WLAN Draft Standard.

Intersil has released the industry's first WLAN chipset designed to support the new 802.11g high-rate WLAN Draft Standard.

Intersil's Prism GT chipset will enable wireless networking systems to attain data transmission speeds up to 54Mbit/s, while remaining backward compatible to the existing installed base of over 15 million Wi-Fi systems worldwide.

Intersil's newest WLAN solution will enable a next generation of high-datarate platforms for operation in the 2.4GHz band that deliver a five-fold speed increase.

In addition, a 30% range advantage and lower power consumption are realised compared with systems operating in the 5GHz spectrum.

The chipset's cost and performance advantages will make it an ideal solution for high-bandwidth enterprise applications, such as wireless video conferencing and large file transfers, as well as advanced home networking applications such as multi-channel CD-quality audio and DVD-quality video streaming.

Prism GT incorporates the 802.11g Draft Standard's mandatory modulation schemes - Complementary Code Keying (CCK) - which is used in 802.11b, and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), used in 802.11a.

"We firmly believe the mandatory modulations specified by the draft standard will meet all the needs of the market", said Larry Ciaccia, vice president and general manager of Intersil's Wireless Networking business.

"Using CCK ensures backward-compatibility with the installed Wi-Fi base, while OFDM provides the speed required for today's high-bandwidth applications.

The Prism GT chipset is the world's first complete chip set designed for 802.11g and will catalyse the market for high-speed wireless connectivity".

Intersil's first generation Prism GT OEM kit will begin sampling in the second quarter of this year with full production slated for the third quarter.

The Prism GT solution takes advantages from Intersil's industry-leading 802.11b chipsets, the direct-down-conversion architecture developed for Prism 3, and the digital signal processing expertise gained in the development of 5GHz 802.11a products.

The transceiver integrates the receiver, transmitter, synthesiser and filters onto a single chip, and interfaces directly with the baseband processor to provide system designers with a complete end-to-end WLAN chip set solution.

The medium access controller (MAC) includes enhanced security and network management features.

The Prism GT transceiver is an RF-to-baseband solution that takes high-frequency radio waves and directly converts them to baseband signals during reception, or directly up-converts them from the low-level baseband signal to radio frequency during transmission.

This architecture completely eliminates the need for the intermediate frequency (IF) stage found in most radios.

Eliminating the IF stage reduces complexity, bill-of-materials (BOM) and manufacturing costs, as well as enabling smaller form factors appropriate for portable, handheld devices.

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