Broadcom's Pushes Chips at All-CMOS 802.11b

According to Webopedia , Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductors (CMOS), use both NMOS (negative polarity) and PMOS (positive polarity) circuits. Because only one of the circuit types is on at any given time, CMOS chips suck up less power than chips using just one type of transistor. Broadcom's new all-CMOS, direct-conversion wireless local area networking (WLAN) chipsets implement IEEE 802.11b wireless, and include the BCM2051 2.4GHz direct-conversion radio and the BCM430x family of baseband processors. These chips are implemented in a standard digital CMOS process and use a direct-conversion radio architecture. The Medium Access Controller (MAC) designed into the Broadcom baseband processors provides hardware-based security that includes the 40-bit encryption specified by the IEEE 802.11 Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) standard, along with the 128-bit extension of WEP, 802.1x, Temporal Key Initiation Protocol (TKIP), and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocol planned for the forthcoming IEEE security specification (IEEE 802.11 TGi). The BCM2051 single-chip radio combines with any BCM430x chip to give you an IEEE 802.11b system. The BCM430x family of Wi-Fi baseband processors includes the BCM4301, with combined wireless LAN baseband processor and MAC functionality; the BCM4302, which adds V.92 modem functionality; the BCM4304, which adds 10/100 Ethernet functionality; and the BCM4307 which adds both V.92 modem and 10/100 Ethernet functionality. Samples of the BCM430x family and the BCM2051 as well as the related BCM9430x evaluation platforms are shipping now.