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Speedy Intersil puts money where Cisco's mouth is

It will be available this year. More wireless speed - without abandoning currently legal WLAN standards - comes one step nearer reality, with Intersil's announcement that it will support Cisco in promoting 802.11g as a serious rival to the still-unlicensed WiFI-5 (802.11a) standard at 54 megabits per second

The emerging new 802.11g WLAN standard combines backwards compatibility with existing 11 GHz WLANS - and Cisco has already publicly committed itself to 11g, saying that it is likely to be available before 802.11a - which is still struggling to gain European approvals.

Intersil says this new 54 megabit standard has all the advantages of 11a (WiFi-5) , plus all the same range and low cost advantages, of 11b WiFi. The new designs will be based on Intersil's newly announced PRISM GT chipset, and will be offered to OEMs such as Cisco, to speed up market acceptance.

The new chipset will be based on a joint development; both Cisco and Intersil will design the reference platform.

The main advantage of going for this standard, rather than 11a, is that people who already have wireless cards in their PCs and palmtops will be able to carry on. The new 11g access points will recognise both 11b and 11g clients.

The other approach to the problem of users with obsolete equipment is that proposed by semiconductor firm Synad, which is designing a dual 11a/11b chip set for clients. This has the advantage of allowing users with Synad chips in their PCs to roam from one type of net to the other; but doesn't necessarily solve the problem of people with plain old 11b devices embedded in their computers.

Neither 11a nor 11g high-speed systems are likely to be available from Cisco at price levels which would attract the home user.

Cisco, famously, is focused on the far more stringent security measures of the enterprise, and prices its equipment accordingly.

However, wireless rival Proxim has already started shipping evaluation units for 11a Wifi-5 systems, and has indicated that pricing for its 11a cards will be very much in line with prices for 11b.

Proxim does have an enterprise-only range, which will put two 11a channels in parallel to the same client, giving a theoretical maximum throughput of 100 megabits per second. But it will release standard 11a parts, which should attract home users wanting to pipe their own multimedia streams around the home.

Intersil's PRISM-based high-speed WLAN chipset solution will support the two mandatory modulation techniques, Complementary Code Keying (CCK) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). The OFDM standard is the one used by Wifi-5 (11a) while the CCK standard is used by 11b.

Exactly how a single access point will support both modulation techniques simultaneously isn't clear, and Intersil has promised to follow up with further data on this.

"This new agreement will accelerate efforts for us to offer a high speed, standards-based solution in the 2.4 GHz band to our worldwide customer base," said Greg Williams, president and CEO of Intersil.

The development of a joint reference design by Intersil and Cisco "is a key element in plans to bring IEEE 802.11g products to market more quickly," the company added.

Further information from mailto:skelle01@intersil.com