Infineon's single-chip XWAY WAVE100 family for 802.11n WLAN home gateways

NEUBIBERG, GERMANY: Infineon Technologies AG introduced a new family of single-chip WLAN ICs. The new XWAY WAVE100 ICs provide a high-performance and cost-effective solution for wireless network access points that are compliant to the 802.11n draft standard for data rates up to 150Mbit/s as well as the 802.11 b/g standard.

The XWAY WAVE100 family lowers the total system cost for home gateway manufacturers, with a significantly reduced RBOM (Rest of Bill-of-Material) and improved manufacturing throughput. Additionally, it is fully compliant to the European Union Code of Conduct (CoC) for broadband equipment energy efficiency.

The single-chip XWAY WAVE100 family integrates the WLAN Baseband, Media Access Controller (MAC), RF, Low Noise Amplifier (LNA) and Power Amplifier (PA) functionalities.

Systems based on the XWAY WAVE100 family require the industry’s lowest number of external components and need no external memory. This results in a RBOM which is about 25 percent lower than existing solutions in the market and up to 70 percent smaller board-space.

In the manufacturing of WLAN equipment, the production throughput largely depends on the trimming of the WLAN device to achieve optimum performance. Trimming adjusts for the characteristics of analog components which vary with the silicon process, temperature and life-time.

With the XWAY WAVE100 family, Infineon provides an innovative integrated tool-box to support on-the-fly trimming with temperature, voltage and supply monitoring during standard operation mode. This provides savings on expensive RF test equipment, in many cases makes external trimming during manufacturing unnecessary, and minimizes calibration time during manufacturing.

“With the new XWAY WAVE100 family, Infineon enables customers to meet growing consumer demand for high-speed wireless connectivity by offering WLAN 802.11n 1x1 with up to four times more speed than earlier generation WLANs at the price of legacy 802.11b/g systems,” said Christian Wolff, President of the Wireline Communications Division at Infineon Technologies.

“By combining our system know-how with expertise in chip design, we focus on product innovations to reduce the total system manufacturing cost for our customers.”