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Atheros, Marvell to push fast 11n into phones

10.02.2011
The fast, high-capacity Wi-Fi that users have been enjoying for a few years in laptops is now due to hit smartphones and tablets in a big way, with two major Wi-Fi chip makers announcing products that use IEEE 802.11n with multiple antennas.

So-called MIMO (multiple-in, multiple-out) technology is one of the key capabilities of 802.11n, the most recent major wireless LAN standard. Access points and client devices based on 11n can exchange multiple streams of data over multiple antennas, making network capacity increase by double or more, depending on how many radios and antennas they have. But this capability so far has been limited mainly to PCs and some home electronics.

On Thursday, Atheros Communications and Marvell Technologies announced MIMO chips for mobile clients. These chips can be deployed in smartphones or other handheld devices to strongly boost the speeds that users enjoy, with little or no additional battery drain, according to the companies. Both companies will showcase these chips at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona next week.

To enjoy the full speed boost of MIMO, both the client and the access point need to have the capability. But the new silicon could be good news for mobile operators with heavily taxed cellular data networks, as well as for subscribers using those networks. Some carriers already use Wi-Fi hotspots extensively in order to give users higher speeds in densely crowded areas. Additional capacity on Wi-Fi should translate into speeds higher than cellular for some users, or an alternative path to the Internet or multimedia applications for people in very crowded areas.

On Thursday, Atheros announced the AR6004, an SOC (system on a chip) with 2x2 MIMO, allowing for two ingoing and two outgoing data streams. The AR6004 can use both the 2.4GHz and the 5GHz radio bands and is capable of real-world speeds as high as 170M bps (bits per second). The company has been able to build MIMO into the AR6004 such that the new chip consumes only 15 percent more power than the current AR6003, which offers only 85M bps, according to Tim Peters, senior director of mobile communications at Atheros.

The Atheros chip is intended for both high-end smartphones and tablets. It will be available in sample quantities by the end of this quarter and in commercial quantities in the first quarter of next year, Peters said.