networkZONE Products for the week of February 24, 2003
Envara Says . . .
Chips At Last! - Envara Samples Its IEEE 802.11a/b/g
and 802.11g-only Chipsets
Envara Inc. is now sampling engineering silicon for its WiND502 multi-mode IEEE 802.11a+b+g wireless LAN chipset. Envara is also simultaneously sampling its WiND512 IEEE 802.11g chipset solution, as well. Both products are 2-chip solutions with a common MAC/Baseband processor, the EN202. The differentiating factor between the two designs is the RF chip, the second chip in the solution. The multi-mode WiND502 employs the EN303 RF chip for IEEE 802.11a/b/g operation, while the WiND512 uses the EN313 RF chip for IEEE 802.11g only operation. The commonality of these two chips enables a dual layout with the option to assemble chipsets and components for multi-mode IEEE 802.11a/b/g or IEEE 802.11g-only operation with minimal investment in product development cost and time. Both chipsets will also share common reference designs, host driver software and chipset firmware enabling customers to further minimize development time of multiple technologies for different applications.
These WiND502 and WiND512 chipset solutions are designed to be compliant with the IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g (draft) standards. These solutions also offer comprehensive wireless LAN security including 40- and 128- bit WEP encryption, and support for IEEE 802.1x and Radius authentication. The chipsets also support the WiFi Protected Access (WPA) enhanced security initiative, based on the IEEE TKIP protocol. Conformance with worldwide radio regulations is supported using dynamic frequency selection (DFS) and transmission power control (TPC) through IEEE 802.11h compatibility. Envara's patented Zero Loss Front End design enables increased receiver sensitivity of at least 5dB more than required by the IEEE standards along with increased coverage range. The patented EZ-IF RF design provides excellent adjacent and alternate radio channel interference rejection. Finally, Envara has accounted for the developing IEEE 802.11e QoS standard by enabling firmware upgrade support for all its options.
Envara's chipset solutions are designed for easy manufacture at the lowest possible cost. As a result, many typical external BOM components such as LNAs, RF switches, baseband filters, and VCOs are integrated into the chipsets, enabling the lowest external BOM costs in the industry. This high level of integration has resulted in chipsets with extremely low power consumption on the order of 50_mW in idle mode and a mere 1.6W in full transmission mode. Furthermore, loopback and calibration blocks are built into Envara's modem and RF silicon enabling very short production line testing time for NICs and other WLAN products based on Envara's chipsets. Finally, the WiND502 is designed to work on all allocated frequencies in the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands worldwide, including the recently proposed 5GHz band allocations in Japan. This One-World radio design approach ensures that WiND502 enabled Network Interface Card (NIC) users can access any type of Wi-Fi wireless network anywhere in the world with absolutely no need for additional hardware or software, providing transparent worldwide Wi-Fi access.
Envara provides a development kit to support customers' development process. These design kits include chipset samples and development systems, as well as all necessary datasheets for each chipset and external BOM component. Hardware reference designs and host software driver source code are also provided. Furthermore, Envara provides a full test utility software package to enable easy production testing of cards using its chipsets. Envara's goal is to provide all the information and support necessary to ensure that customers are able to rapidly integrate these chipsets into current and new product designs.
Overall these chipsets offer complete solutions for both multi-mode and single mode wireless networking, as well as transparent worldwide operation. "The WiND502 and WiND512 are designed to deliver superior throughput, range and robustness in a highly integrated 2-chip design that enables very low cost products for our customers," commented Izik Kirshenbaum, Envara's President and CEO. Kirshenbaum also noted, "Wireless LAN is growing increasingly ubiquitous and its use is growing exponentially worldwide. As a result, the quality of WLAN radio performance is becoming the primary product feature and differentiator, however ensuring such quality at a marketable cost is a very difficult proposition. At Envara we're confident that we have more than succeeded in this task, significantly raising the standard in the WLAN arena." Kirshenbaum closed saying, "Envara's goal is to become a dominant player in WLAN chipset design by creating complete, market leading solutions that do not compromise on cost, quality, or customer support."
Envara is already sampling chipsets for alpha customers in Taiwan and
Japan, and will be offering private demonstrations to key customers and
market makers in Taiwan, Japan, Korea and the United States beginning in
March. Initial production quality chipsets' shipments units will begin in
April, ramping to mass production in larger quantities in June. Chipset
pricing for customers implementing multi-mode WiND502 IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless
networking systems are targeted to enable total BOM costs of below $35 for
orders of 100k units or more. Customers who choose the WiND512 IEEE 802.11g
only solution will see a further 10-20% reduction in total BOM costs over
the WiND502 multi-mode solution.
analogZONE Says . . .
Editor's Note: It's both exciting and challenging to have both Envara and IceFyre, two of my favorite dual-band 802.11a/g solutions, making their debuts in the same week. I've been eagerly awaiting both announcements for some time, and despite am overload with other projects, I'll do my best to give them both the attention they deserve. You can start here and read all about the Envara chip set, but be sure you click over to see what IceFyre's been up to as well.
If you're a regular analogZONE reader, you may recall that I took a close look at Envara's EN303 RF chip back in July of 2002 and was very impressed. If you don't have the time to click over for the full review, I'll tell you that Envara's choice to implement a relatively conservative low-IF architecture on their SiGe RF chip, plus a handful of innovations produced a device that seemed to deliver superior sensitivity, adjacent channel rejection, and full output power. This, and the conspicuous absence of an external antenna switch made the transceiver look like a real winner once its companion MAC chip arrived.
The news this week is that they have a MAC/Baseband chip now, and it supports the still-in-progress 802.11g protocol. And in a wise acknowledgement of the current popularity of 2.4-GHz-only products, they have introduced a second cost-reduced "g-only" RF chip.
A Full 802.11a/g Solution
Their EN202 MAC/baseband chip has two processors, plus specialized logic for accelerating the MAC and baseband functions (See block diagram.) The ARM 7 core handles control functions for the modem, while the ARM 9 (running at 160 MHz) is the MAC engine which in conjunction with a CRC/encryption accelerator, does all the MAC functions. The programmability afforded by its RISC-based architecture should make it flexible enough to allow it to adapt to any last-minute changes in the still-evolving 802.11g standard.
Envara also feels that that the extra processing punch supplied by the combination of ARMS and fixed logic will eliminate the bottlenecks that limit channel capacity in Atheros and Broadcom chips. They claim that the solutions currently on the market can only deliver 20-23 Mbit/s out of the approx 27 Mbit/s that a full-up 54-Mbit/s OFDM channel should be able to deliver (once overhead is factored in.) Cost-conscious developers should also note that there is still 20-30% of the ARM's processing capacity available for supporting other external applications. The one caveat here is that the applications should not have lots of real-time requirements, or it could come into conflict with the time-critical elements of the wireless MAC.
The one thing I did not get out of Envara is whether their baseband section does any specialized processing to further reduce co-channel interference and multipath signals in the way that Marvell's Libertas does (see my discussion about this in the review I did on Libertas this last summer). Even if they don't do such baseband processing tricks, Envara may meet Marvell's radio chip, that delivers such high levels of performance to begin with - especially its co-channel and adjacent-channel rejection. Only time and user experience will tell the full story on such a complex and touch issue, and I'd welcome readers to share their experiences and opinions with me.
When in active transmit/receive mode, its power consumption (1700/1200 mW) just slightly on the high side of the average for other 802.11 a/g products, but idle power (where it spends around 80% of its time ) is an impressive 50 mW. While the low idle power makes the chipset one of the more energy-efficient products on the market, Envara is already working on dropping both operating and idle power for the next generation.
Now that Envara is close to having production chips and evaluation systems, it's only a matter of time until I get to see the whole chip set up and running in a PC card. I can't wait to get my hands on some of these early demo units so I can run my famous "elevator test" and heap other real-world abuses on it to see whether it delivers as-promised. Hopefully, there will be a way to selectively engage either the 2.4-GHz or 5-GHz radios, so I can finally begin to compare the actual range and performance offered by the two bands.
An 802.11g-Only Solution
I agree with the strong case that Envara, Marvell, TI, and some other folks make for 2.4-GHz only products. While dual-band 802.11a/g products should dominate the market within three years, the bulk of today's market still lies in 2.4-GHz equipment. And, for many SOHO applications, the 802.11g standard (if it is ever finalized) will continue to supply the bandwidth and mobility many people want at a lower price point. That's why I think Envara is smart to target the market for 802.11g-only products in the SOHO-oriented multimedia gateways and set-top boxes.
Their "g"-only chip set uses the same baseband processor as the dual-band product, and. is still fabricated in SiGe (minus the 5-GHz signal chain), so you still get all the performance advantages and reduced passive component count that the original dual-band product offers. As I've noted in my earlier review, their receiver sensitivity consistently exceeds the 802.11g spec by 6 dB - something that should translate into a 10-30% range increase in the "real" world. Their product has 6dB greater adjacent channel rejection - which becomes even more critical in "g" operation where there are only 3 channels. This is also a very important feature for operation in congested public areas, something that explains why these products have attracted so much interest in Japan.
The $2-$3 savings on the chip price, plus a couple more dollars in passives, related components, and assembly costs could allow manufacturers to build a high-performance 802.11b/g product that will go head-to-head with Marvell's Libertas solution (one of my other favorite 2.4-GHz products.) And speaking of Libertas, I'd be reviewing the 802.11g-capable version of Marvell's chip here this week, but a few logistical snafus got in the way. Hopefully, they will be cleared up shortly and you'll see the review here next week. Stay tuned.
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