WLAN chips

According to experts, WLAN chips are all set to do extremely well. With wireless connectivity becoming more and more a reality and not only corporates, but also homes going for it, there is only one direction it can go. And that is UP. According to estimates, more than 13 million chips are likely to be sold just for the home market in 2006. Not bad, for a segment whose figures can only rise. Not surprisingly therefore, companies are starting to come out with WLAN chips.

IceFyre Semiconductor: This company located at Ontario in Canada is known for their SureFyre? 802.11a and TwinFyre? 802.11a/b/g chips that promise improved power efficiency, range and sensitivity, particularly for demanding multimedia applications.

With a team that has people from IBM, Nortel Networks, National Semiconductor, Intersil and Nokia, the company already has in excess of 31 patents granted to them or pending for a new class of orthogonal-frequency-division-multiplexing (OFDM) radio design. The first two integrated-circuit (IC) sets can support the 5-GHz IEEE 802.11a standard for bit rates to 54 Mb/s and the TwinFyre can be used for the 3 leading WLAN standards, that is IEEE 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g, at both 2.4 and 5 GHz.

Engim WLAN chips: Chips from Engim Inc. allows one WiFi access point to carry data on multiple channels. As a result, more clients can simultaneously gain from WiFi. There is also a feature that is known as ?transmit cancellation?. It can prevent interference that an access point's transmitting antenna can cause to the same access point's receiving antenna.

Each access point can only use one channel. However by simply putting 3 access points in one location with each on a different channel or just building an access point with 3 chips on different channels would not lead to enhanced performance because they will interfere with each other.