Atheros 4th gen chipsets boost range and battery life

Atheros today announced two chipsets using new technologies that extend WLAN range while reducing power consumption.

The AR5004X dual-band 802.11a/b/g and AR5004G single-band 802.11b/g chipsets are two chip solutions incorporating previously-introduced AR5112 and AR2112 radios with a new AR5213 baseband/MAC chip. The new chipsets use eXtended Range (XR) technology that Atheros says provides twice the range of existing designs, while reducing system power consumption by 60 percent .

Both chipsets are available now in volume, but XR-based products that take advantage of all the new chipsets’ features probably won’t hit the channel until late this year or early 2004 .

The company claims its eXtended Range technology delivers receive sensitivities of up to 105dBm , which is over 20 dB better than required by the 802.11 specification and similar to cellular phone performance. It also supports OFDM-based communication at rates lower than the 6Mbps mandated by the 802.11g specification.

Atheros tests on an XR-based mini-PCI card integrated into a notebook computer actually found almost triple the range of Broadcom 54g and Intel Centrino (802.11b) equipped computers in open-field testing. Atheros also claims that XR will let a single access point cover multi-story brick or masonry homes and enable public hot spots with coverage cells up to a kilometer wide, while being fully interoperable with non-XR Wi-Fi compliant products.

Battery life improvement is achieved via smarter power management of different sections of the wireless device depending on system activity and an idle mode that Atheros says consumes 95 percent less power than Intel Centrino-based wireless products.

Both new chipsets also include support for Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), draft 802.11i Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) with no performance reduction, draft 802.11e Quality of Service enhancements, and Atheros’ proprietary Super G and Super A/G throughput enhancement technology. The products also include integrated wireless network management capabilities, including "Wake-on-Wireless" and "Wake-on-Theft" .