Stepmind details chips in support of Hiperlan2 and 4G

Stepmind details chips in support of Hiperlan2 and 4G
By Peter Clarke, Semiconductor Business News
February 17, 2003 (8:27 a.m. EST)
URL: http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20030217S0011

PARIS --- Stepmind SA, a fabless design house that specializes in wireless chips, has provided some details of a wireless LAN chipset capable of supporting both the IEEE802.11a and ETSI HiperLAN2 standards, and said it would introduce the first version, in mid 2003.

"This total WLAN solution includes a WLAN baseband processor with its protocol software and a single-chip 5-GHz transceiver," said Andre Jolivet, business development manager and Stepmind founder, in a statement. "It achieves the highest integration, lowest component count and lowest BOM [bill of materials] on the market," he added.

The internal architecture of the baseband chip is designed to support integration with an 802.11b modem and with Stepmind's GSM/GPRS/EDGE solution to provide support for a fourth generation, mobile communications platform, the company said.

The 5-GHz RF transceiver is a zero intermediate frequency device that includes the synthesizer and voltage-c ontrolled oscillators. The chip is capable of emitting up to +10-dBm in both the American and European 5-GHz WLAN bands without any external power amplifier, the company said.

As part of its offering Stepmind plans to provide software protocol stacks for IEEE802.11a and ETSI HiperLAN2, with standard network and application interfaces, such as CardBus for network interface card (NIC) products and Ethernet for Access Points.