NewLogic Offers IEEE 802.11 a/b/g CMOS Dual-band WLAN Radio IP with digital Interface

NewLogic announces the availability of a WLAN Radio with HiSS (High Speed Serial) interface as chip level IP

SAME Conference, Sophia Antipolis, France - October 8th, 2003 - NewLogic Technologies, a leading supplier of intellectual property (IP) cores for wireless systems, today announced the availability of a WLAN dual-band radio IP core in CMOS technology with a digital interface (HiSS).

The HiSS interface is a low pin-count digital link between radio and baseband chips replacing the analog I/Q interface. The advantage of such a digital interface is that analog functions, like ADC/DAC converters are now all moved into the radio. Therefore the baseband chip does not need to contain any WLAN related mixed signal block, which reduces SoC design effort, improves yield, reduces test-effort and allows the design to be ported to different technologies without having to redesign the process sensitive data converters. To ensure that the HiSS interface does not affect the performance of the radio, NewLogic took special measures in the design. This new radio complements the existing radio with analog I/Q interface, which is already available as samples for demonstration and evaluation.

The basis for this new member of NewLogic radio IP is the WiLD Radio: a 2.4GHz and 5GHz dual-band 802.11 a/b/g WLAN CMOS radio macro usable for stand alone solution or for integration with standard WLAN ICs and ASICs. The radio is ideally suited for use in cost sensitive designs and where low power consumption is a key factor to success. As the macro is silicon proven it enables customers to build products very fast and meet their time to market requirements.

The 802.11a/b/g WLAN Radio IP with digital interface is the latest member of NewLogic's WiLD product family and is complemented by the WiLD Modems, the WiLD MAC and Software to implement a complete IEEE 802.11a/b/g WLAN system, designed for high performance at the lowest cost. The modems are also available with the HiSS interface or an analog I/Q interface option.

"Offering a digital interface for a 802.11 radio is particularly interesting for customers who want to build bigger SoC designs with integrated MAC and Modems. Having the ADC/DAC moved into the radio offers these customer significant freedom in their technology roadmap", commented Uwe Hering, Sr. VP Sales and Marketing of NewLogic. "Another benefit is the ability to place the radio chip further away from the baseband chip e.g. on the corner of a laptop screen which gives another level of freedom for the system design and could improve reception to provide longer range and/or higher data-rates."

The WiLD Radio is available as a process independent architecture license or as hard macro on TSMC's 0.18µm RF CMOS process technology. With its Zero-IF architecture and the integration of the LNA (Low Noise Amplifier) and VCO, the Radio requires significantly less external components than comparable solutions and enables designs with lowest BoM on the market. NewLogic implemented several levels of low power modes (e.g. deep sleep, sleep, park and listen mode) and took special measures in the design to reduce overall system power consumption. For example a Cartesian Feedback Loop is implemented to improve linearity for high power modes and reduce the overall power consumption of the solution. Another feature is the ability for RSSI measurement and automatic packet detection without the data ADC active, which saves additional power. With a power supply of 1.8-2.0 V the radio with the analog interface consumes about 300 mW in 802.11 g transmit mode and 220 mW in the receive mode at maximum output power. The radio with the HiSS interface has a slightly higher power value due to the ADC/DACs integrated. From a system perspective this is neutral as the ADC/DACs are no longer required in the baseband chip. The radio solution offers a high level of 3.5 dBm mean output power for the Complementary Code Key (CCK) mode at 11Mb/s for 802.11b and -2 dBm for the Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) mode at 54 Mb/s for 802.11 g.

With an input sensitivity of -86.5 dBm for the CCK and -73 dBm for OFDM applications the radio enables easy development of high performance systems.

The IP for this new HiSS interface will be available to customers by end of the year.

NewLogic Technologies, headquartered in Lustenau, Austria, is a leading global supplier of IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN and Bluetooth intellectual property (IP) cores and next generation cellular technology. In addition NewLogic offers IC design and IP Integration to help its customers achieve their aggressive time to market goals.