Low power platform

Santa Clara, CA-based

has introduced its Pine1-LP Wireless LAN (WLAN) Platform, claiming that it’s the world’s lowest power licensable 802.11b/g platform.

In operation, it draws less than 170mA [377mW] for the complete SDIO/SPI based WLAN reference design during a 54Mbps FTP download. VoIP calls draw only 12.5mA [35.6mW].

The company says that the platform can be built into low power, cost sensitive applications such as single and dual-mode mobile handsets, PDAs, digital cameras, MP3 players, gaming and printing platforms.

The Pine1-LP IEEE 802.11b/g reference design includes a baseband (BBP), media access controller (MAC), Analog Front End (AFE), an 802.11b/g RF transceiver and Power Amplifiers (PA), as well as SDIO and SPI host interfaces.

The SDIO interface is specifically designed to support full 54Mbps 802.11g data rates.

The Pine1-LP MAC, which supports the new 802.11i (security) and 802.11e (QoS) standards, is based on a unique programmable packet engine which off-loads all WLAN packet processing and TCP checksum calculations from the host resulting in lower power and increased system performance.

The platform has support for Bluetooth co-existence in the 2.4GHz band with popular Bluetooth chips.

In addition, it includes an extensive suite of firmware and driver support for Linux, Windows CE 5.0 and other popular operating systems.