Showing posts with label power. Show all posts
Showing posts with label power. Show all posts

Sunday, June 15, 2008

Low power wlan devices

Who makes WLAN chips that go into cell-phone/smart-phone? A search leads to some information:

1) Atheros AR6002 (Oct 2007)
- 70 percent less power than competitive solutions on the market in active mode while downloading content
* 100 hours to deplete a standard 3.7V, 800mAh phone battery in continual VoIP mode
*
200 gigabytes of data can be downloaded before depleting the same battery
- Near-Zero Power in Standby (6 µW)
http://www.atheros.com/news/AR6002.htm

2) Broadcom BCM4326 (Oct 2006)
- single-chip 802.11Wi-Fi transceivers and radios with an innovative software architecture that drastically reduces the Wi-Fi subsystem's total power consumption
- exceptional power performance that enables a 54Mbps full-rate active receive power consumption of less than 270 mW
- system battery life enhanced through combination of complete on-chip driver control and other sophisticated software capabilities
http://www.broadcom.com/press/release.php?id=919562

3) ST Microelectonics STLC4550 (Apr 2006)
- 30µW sleep mode
http://www.stmicroelectronic.com/stonline/stappl/cms/press/news/year2006/p2020.htm


Comments:
As the deployment of WiFi increases, it will be adopted in more mobile devices to enable better coverage and also different business models and applications. As a result, I would think
a) the market for wifi chips will grow (and maybe follow the trend of cellphone chips)
b) the winner will likely be the low-energy candidate (assuming all other things are equal)