Consortium proposes future Wi-Fi standard
Six leading companies involved in the wireless LAN sector have proposed a new standard that could operate at up to 540 Mb/s.
The so-called "WWiSE" consortium, which includes the chip manufacturers Texas Instruments (TI) and ST Microelectronics (STM), has submitted its idea to the IEEE s "Task Group N". The task group is overseeing the development of next-generation wireless connectivity capable of sustaining data throughput of over 100 Mb/s.
The standard that eventually emerges will be denoted 802.11n, and will supersede the 802.11a, b and g standards that are used at the moment.
These existing standards have a maximum theoretical link speed of 54 Mb/s, but in practice the throughput of such connexions is far below this data rate.
According to the consortium, WWiSE stands for "worldwide spectrum efficiency". The six companies say that their proposal was developed with global deployment and backwards-compatibility in mind.
The proposal is centered around the use of the current 20 MHz Wi-Fi channel width. The 540 Mb/s links will be generated by utilising either a 2x2 configuration of 135 Mb/s connexions at 20 MHz, or a 4x4 structure that uses a 40 MHz channel width.
The wireless LAN, or Wi-Fi, sector has emerged in the past couple of years as a substantial market for GaAs and SiGe chip manufacturers, as these devices are required in the power amplifier stages of the wireless links.
As well as chipmakers TI and STM, the WWiSE group includes Airgo Networks, Bermai, Broadcom and Conexant Systems.
