SCIENCE

Redpine Signals announced the launch of its Maxi-Fi BEAM450 suite of highly integrated semiconductor products conforming to the 802.11n standard. The Maxi-Fi BEAM450 family is the industry's first MIMO chipset to support "software configurable simultaneous dual-band." This patent pending feature enables the system integrators to re-configure the MIMO chipset on-the-fly from a 3-Spatial Stream 450Mbps 3x3 system (working in either 2.4GHz or 5GHz ISM bands) into a simultaneous dual-band system with 150Mbps in one band and 300Mbps in the other band.

Simultaneous dual-band enables robust QoS provisioning for demanding video applications in crowded wireless environments, and significantly, the Maxi-Fi BEAM450 provides this at zero cost and power overhead to the system. The new Maxi-Fi products include the RS9330 802.11n Baseband chip interfacing to either the RS8330 (Dual-band MIMO Radio chip) or the RS8331 (Dual-band MIMO Radio chip with built-in high power-amplifiers).  The Maxi-Fi BEAM450 chipsets complement Redpine Signals' highly successful ultra-low power 802.11n Lite-Fi device family.

Redpine also provides TURBO900 and TURBO1350 reference designs, which use two or three RS9330 chips respectively. These designs provide physical layer throughputs of 900Mbps and 1.35Gbps on a "single" PCI-e host interface, thus addressing the performance requirements of today's most demanding wireless video applications.

With CMOS integration of a high performance MAC, baseband processor, analog front-end, crystal oscillator, calibration EEPROM, balun, dual-band RF transceiver and dual-band high-power amplifiers (RS8331 only), the Maxi-Fi BEAM450 products are cost-effective solutions targeting high throughput and high QoS wireless applications such as HD video streaming, storage devices, wireless routers, broadband access modems, televisions, access points, and set-top boxes.  The Maxi-Fi BEAM450 chipset maintains over 300Mbps of TCP data throughput on various host platforms and runs on the 802.11n MAC on a powerful SoC based on Redpine's proprietary four-threaded processor (ThreadArch) with very low-host overhead.

The Maxi-Fi BEAM450 chipset is accompanied by Redpine's OneBox software framework with DirectLINQ. OneBox supports Access Point, Station and Wi-Fi Direct functionality on a variety of host platforms and operating systems including Linux and Windows families. Redpine also offers form-factor PCI-e and USB2.0 reference designs and software for manufacture testing and diagnostics, minimizing effort and time-to-market in the building of complete systems.

Availability

The Maxi-Fi BEAM450 chipsets will be sampling in Q3-2011, with volume shipment scheduled for Q1-2012.