Atheros ROCm Technology Teams with Texas Instruments to Enable Wi-Fi in Mobile, High-Quality Video Products

(Top News, 5 Sep 2007)

Atheros Communications Inc.'s single-chip AR6001GL and AR6001XL Radio-on-Chip for Mobile (ROCm) WLAN designs have been selected by Texas Instruments Inc. to support wireless connectivity with its new TMS320DM355 processor based on DaVinci technology. The resulting combination is an extremely low-cost, low-power, high-performance platform that delivers quality video wirelessly for Portable Media Players (PMPs), IP security cameras and other portable digital video products. Given TI's rigorous platform testing and pre-qualification, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and developers are assured that the performance of Atheros' ROCm Wi-Fi solutions combined with the DM355 processor meet the demanding requirements of portable digital video products.

Atheros' 802.11g and 802.11a/g solutions provide fast roaming capabilities that allow a device to stay connected to the best available WLAN with high performance throughput and reliability. The ROCm solutions provide a rich set of features which support voice and video through polled QoS extensions (802.11e and WMM). The result is secure, uninterrupted transmission of latency-sensitive applications such as music downloads and video delivery. The highly compact AR6001 enables design flexibility to meet growing consumer demand for sleek, lightweight mobile devices.

In addition to high performance Wi-Fi connectivity, Atheros' ROCm family delivers exceptional, low power overhead operation on the device's host processor. To achieve power savings, the chips use advanced techniques including Automatic Power Save Delivery (APSD) and Atheros' proprietary low-power sleep mode resulting in substantially extended battery life.

"Wi-Fi connectivity in portable video devices is fast becoming the standard with our DaVinci technology developers who want to enable media downloads and high-quality video streams wirelessly," said John Dixon, DaVinci Technology Marketing Manager for TI. "Atheros' ROCm solutions offered through module partners deliver the right mix of price, performance and power to complement the features of the DM355 processor. The resulting platform is an easy-to-use, turnkey solution which allows our customers to quickly bring to market the industry's most advanced wireless-enabled video products."

The DaVinci processor with ARM host control and complete development tool kit helps manufacturers to quickly and easily develop low-cost portable, digital devices with HD video capability. Additionally, the DM355 device consists of an integrated video processing subsystem, an MPEG-4-JPEG co-processor (MJCP), an ARM926EJ-S core and peripherals.

"Atheros ROCm solutions are ideal for DaVinci customers who want to easily enable high-performance Wi-Fi without incremental investment in development and time," said Sam Endy, Vice President and General Manager, mobile wireless for Atheros. "We're pleased that Atheros' mobile technology has been selected to provide wireless connectivity to DaVinci processors to enhance the delivery of multimedia everywhere."

All members of the ROCm family are full-speed, hardware-based, security compliant with the WPA, WPA2 and 802.11i standards and Atheros' industry standardized simple network configuration software—JumpStart for Wireless. The solutions also come with full driver support for Windows CE 6.0 and Linux-based designs.


Click here for more information on Atheros' AR6001 ROCm family of chipsets

Click here for more information on the DM355 processor

Click here for more information on Atheros Communications