Marvell enters draft-11g chipset market

Broadband communications and storage chipmaker Marvell apparently wants in on the increasingly crowded wireless LAN chip battle. Today it announced its Libertas 802.11g family of two-chip solutions for both draft-802.11g clients and access points.

Both solutions utilize the same 88W8010 radio chip, with different ARM9-based Baseband processor/MAC chips used for client or AP applications. The Baseband Processor/MAC chips also incorporate a AES/CCM hardware security acceleration engine to minimize host CPU overhead that can result in throughput loss.

Marvell representatives said that although the WLAN market is a crowded one, they have high hopes for both their 802.11b and draft-11g chipsets. While declining to announce any draft-11g design-ins, they said that a number of "famous makers" of 802.11b products would be starting to use Marvell 802.11b Libertas devices toward the "end of Q1".

Marvell will be demonstrating their draft-11g capabilities at next month's CeBIT and said that draft-11g product would be available for review in the May/June 2003 timeframe.